'As soon as I could get here without help,' he answered. 'I thought I should be able to find the very spot where I lay, by remembering the cross which the bare mountain-ash boughs made against the sky; but by that time they were all leaf and flower; and now, do you see, there they are, with the fruit just formed and blushing.'
'Like other things,' said Mary, reaching after the spray, 'once all blossom, now—'
'Fruit very unripe,' as he said, between a smile and a sigh; 'but there is some encouragement in the world after all, and every project of mine has not turned out like my two specimens of copper ore. You remember them, Mary and our first encounter?'
'Remember it!' said Mary. 'I don't think I forgot a day of that summer.'
'What I brought you here for,' said Louis, 'was to ask you to let me do what I have long wished—to let me put the letter M here?'
'I think you might have done it without leave,' said Mary.
'So I might at first, but by the time I came here again, Mary, you had become in my estimation 'a little more than kin,' and less than—no, I wont say that, but one could not treat you as comfortably as Clara. I lost a cousin one August day, and never found her again!'
'Never?'
'Never—but the odd thing is, that I cannot believe that what I did find has been away these seven years.'
'Yes, that is very strange,' said Mary; 'I have felt it so. Wo do seem to understand and guess each other's thoughts as if we had been going on together all this time. I believe it is because you gave me the first impulse to think, and taught me the way.'