H. J."
Midsummer came, and passed, and Mrs. Jerome still lingered. In her pursuit for health she had been indefatigable. There was hardly a road throughout the region which had been left untried, hardly a forest path unexplored, or a mountain spring untasted.
"For a woman that sets up for delicate," remarked Mrs. Squires, as from her point of observation behind the window-blinds she watched Mrs. Jerome spring with a girl's elastic grace from the carriage, "for a woman that sets up for delicate, she can stan' more ridin' around, an' scramblin' up mountains, than any woman I ever see. I couldn't do it—that's sure an' sartain!"
"It's sperrit, Rhody, sperrit. Them's the kind o' women that'll go through fire and flood to git what they're after."
"Yes, an' drag everybody along with 'em," added Mrs. Squires, meaningly.
There was one place to which they rode which held a peculiar charm for Mrs. Jerome,—a small lake, deep set among the hills and lying always in the shadow. Great pines grew down to its brink and hung far out over its surface, which was almost hidden by thickly growing reeds and the broad leaves and shining cups of water-lilies. Dragonflies darted over it, and a dreamy silence invested it. A boat lay moored at the foot of the tangled path which led from the road, and they often left the carriage, and rowed and floated about until night-fall among the reeds and lilies.
They were floating in this way, near the close of a sultry August afternoon. Lill lay coiled upon a shawl in the bottom of the boat, her arms full of lilies whose lithe stems she was twining together, talking to herself, meanwhile, in a pretty fashion of her own.
Granger was seated in the bow of the boat, with folded arms, and eyes fixed upon the dark water. His face was pale and moody. It had worn that expression often of late, and he had fallen into a habit of long intervals of silence and abstraction.
The beautiful woman who sat opposite him, idly trailing one hand, whiter and rosier than the lily it held, in the water, seemed also under some unusual influence. She had not spoken for some time. Now and then she would raise the white lids of her wonderful eyes, and let them sweep slowly over the downcast face of Granger.