"What are you talking about, back there?" exclaimed his guide, turning sharply to call him to account.
"Did I speak aloud? I was—ah—only wondering where we are going to bring up?"
"Do I tire you? Perhaps you are not used to walking. Never mind; we shall soon reach the graveyard, and then you can sit upon the stone wall and rest."
"I think I can last to the graveyard," meekly said the young man, whose tramps in the Alps and Dolomites and Rockies had included of "broken records" not a few.
"Now, you are laughing at me," she said, suspiciously. "But you know I have never heard of you except as a lounger in clubs and a leader of cotillons."
Vance thought it useless to protest.
They now reached an enclosure under a grove of maples, where, motioning him to sit upon a low wall tapestried with moss and fern and creepers, she perched upon the gnarled root of a tree, and, opening her book, prepared to become absorbed in it.
"Suppose you read aloud to me," he suggested, with cunning aforethought.
"This?" she said, doubtfully, surveying his verses. "Oh, no; I think not. You would hardly care for this. It is something quite out of your line, don't you see? The writer gives expression to a perfectly straightforward, yet eloquent, expression of a true man's true feeling, about a thing of every day. It is not only that the words are lovely and the sentiment is noble, but the measure ripples like a stream—Why, what is the matter with you? One would think you know the author."
"I am afraid, upon reflection, that I do not know the author," he said, drawing back into his shell.