"You have seen the girl that came with Miss May?"
"Yes, she is a beauty. And she has caught you? I'm glad of it. Oh, it seems that old mother Nature is not disposed to let us drift far apart. In common we felt many an emotion, and love came along to teach one of us what the other did not know. But you don't mean that you have fallen in love with her so soon?"
"I don't know anything when I think of her, Mars. Bob. More than half my life seems to be compressed into the few hours she has been under our roof."
It was getting late, and Bob went to bed soon after we reached the room, to dream of a love that had leaped to meet his own; and I lay there listening to the faint cries of a child, and the almost silent sounds of foot-falls on the floor, down the hall. In the morning I was up before the sun, dodging about among the trees at the east end of the veranda. At last she came down to freshen her eyes with a glimpse of the dawn-couch, purple with the sun's resurrection.
"I am almost persuaded that you are determined to earn your salt, you are up so early," she said with a smile brighter than the new day.
"Is it because you are from the sugar lands of Louisiana that salt is such a novelty to you?" I asked. She did not reply, but stood looking at the hills, far away.
"I never get tired of them," she said; "they are so strange and new. We have no hills in our country, you know; nothing but a level stretch as far as the eye can see, and we know that beyond this another level stretch lies, and beyond that, still another. But here, I don't know what's beyond. Blue mystery everywhere."
"Some time I will take the buggy and drive you over to the hills," I said, and the light of a new interest flew to her eyes.
"Will you? That will be kind. But will they let you take the buggy?"