The girl's mock reverence for his learning irritated him unspeakably, and he closed his lips in a thin, tight line.
"Cousin Rob," she said, putting her hand on his arm, and with bewildering kindness in her tone, "can't you take me just as I am?"
The temptation to take her, just as she was, into his arms, made him draw back a step or two. "I always make a point of that," he said, clearing his throat.
Then a vista opened before them, which might have been a field of Paradise. Across the plain, where the dead goldenrod of Autumn still lingered, there were white blossoms on invisible branches, set against the turquoise sky, as still as stars of frost. It was as though a cloud of white butterflies had paused for an instant, with every dusty wing longing for flight.
Great white triliums bloomed in clusters farther on, with here and there a red one, lonely as a lost child. Far to the right was a little hollow filled with wild phlox, shading from white to deepest lavender, and breathing the haunting fragrance which no one ever forgets.
"Let's go to the lake," she said.
Tall bluffs rose on either side where they turned eastward, with triliums and dog-tooth violets within easy reach, and a robin's cheery chirp was answered by another far away. Slanting sunbeams came like arrows of light into the shadow of the woods, and at the shore line was an expanse of sand which shone like silver under the white light of noon.
"Why do you stand there?" asked Beatrice. "Why don't you sit down?"
"I was just looking at something."
"What?"