Ten minutes later Matthew and Undine were walking down the hill while Mrs. Milliken watched them from behind the parlor curtains.
Undine Berry was a beauty, there was no denying that! Her hair was spun gold, breaking into bewitching little waves and curls round her temples, her ears, and the nape of her neck. Her skin was perfect, her hands and feet small, her figure lovely. A person (female) intent upon finding flaws would have said her features were rather immature and meaningless and that her eyes, though of heaven's own blue in color, were a little cold and calculating, but Matthew Milliken saw no flaws. He thought of her as something so exquisite that he would have liked to put her under a glass case on his parlor melodeon. If only he could get far enough in friendship to fathom her likes and dislikes, her desires, her ambitions, so that he might guess whether there was any chance for a clumsy creature like himself to win her love! But he scarcely knew how to set about such a task. Every time he advanced, she seemed to retreat a little to fastnesses of thought where he was not at home.
"Some folks don't seem to hold up their heads before the public nor care how their buildings look," Undine commented severely, as they passed a poor little house, forlorn, unpainted, lacking clapboards and shingles.
"Well, a man has got to have a little money saved up, have good health, and work night and day to keep up his farm nowadays," said Matthew. "If my father hadn't left me an awful good piece of land, forty acres of it, with fifteen in woodland, as well as something to go on with till I was big enough to take hold for myself, I don't know how I'd 'a' come out—and my place isn't rightly kep' up, either; I know it. I intend to begin improvin' it this summer. I've got a man comin' to work through hayin' time, I'll get skilled help inside, and you'll see a reg'lar palace when you come back, Undine—There!"—and he checked himself and grew red in the face, as he added: "Your front name slipped out before I thought. I suppose you wouldn't let me call you 'Undine,' would you, Miss Berry?"
"Well, I don't think it would sound quite proper, Mr. Milliken—at any rate, in public. You see, people might talk, and other young men would be asking the same privilege. I always think it makes a girl appear sort of common, corresponding with gentlemen, giving away her photographs, and being called by her first name on a few weeks' acquaintance."
"Would you feel the same about calling me 'Matthew,' if there wasn't anybody 'round?" he stammered.
"To tell the truth, I don't feel as if we'd been friends long enough for me to call you 'Matthew'—yet—Mr. Milliken. I am so unlike other girls. Sometimes I wish I wasn't. I am so reserved, so unsuited to the life I'm living. Mother says she must have guessed what I was going to be like when she named me Undine."
They were leaning over the bridge-rail now, looking into the foamy rapids of the Saco, as thousands of other young couples had leaned and looked in all the years since the river began to run.
"Most everybody round here is named out of the Bible," said Matthew. "Look at our neighborhood. There's Mark Hobson, Luke Dunn, John Briggs, and me to represent the apostles; there's a Samuel, a Josiah, a David, an Elijah, and a Jeremiah, an' by George! there's a Sarah, a Naomi, an' a Rachel! I looked through the Old Testament last evening to find your name, but I couldn't!"
"Oh, no!" said Undine, in a tone conveying her idea that the Bible was a rather second-class source for names. "I was called Undine out of a fairy story that everybody was reading when mother was a girl. Undine was not a real woman, she was a water-sprite, and a knight named Lord Huldbrand found her standing in a brook in the forest and fell in love with her. She had been found on the river bank and brought up by a fisherman and his wife. She loved the knight and married him, and after a long time she turned from a water-sprite into a woman, for love had given her a soul!"