"Ah! are we not bidden to be content with such things as we have, and to be always rejoicing?"
They had become excellent friends—these two—as day after day they rode side by side a little in advance of the wagons.
There was some ten years difference in their ages, a good deal seemingly at Nell's time of life. She looked up to Kenneth as to one much older and wiser than herself, and won by his ever ready sympathy and interest, talked to him with the charming frankness of her confiding nature and extreme youth. She told the history of her past years, particularly the last five, which had been spent in a boarding school in Philadelphia, and about the brother she was going to:—how he fought bravely for his country in the Continental army, had been taken prisoner by the British, what he had suffered on one of those dreadful prison-ships, till peace at last set him free, that he had married since and now had a family of children.
He was very much older than herself, she explained, being the eldest born while she was the youngest, and as both parents had died while she was a mere infant, he was like a father to her. Kenneth seldom spoke of himself, but she sometimes led him on by her questions to talk of his home at Glen Forest, his mother and Marian, for both of whom he evidently cherished a deep and tender affection.
Nell remarked that she had seen them at church once or twice, had thought Mrs. Clendenin very sweet and noble looking, and Marian the loveliest of little girls.
"You read them both aright," was Kenneth's answer, with a look and smile that made him, Nell thought, the handsomest man she had ever seen.
"If he were not quite so old," she said to herself, "perhaps, I don't know, but perhaps I might fall in love with him. It would be very foolish though, for of course he could never care for such a silly young thing as I am."
She had observed that he seemed a skilful physician and surgeon, and had discovered that he could tell her a vast deal about trees and plants and the birds and wild animals of the woods through which they passed.
They had never met in Philadelphia though living there at the same time, but it was pleasant to talk with him about the city and its various attractions.
So they had not been at a loss for subjects of conversation, nor were they to-day.