"Do I?" She leaned affectionately over him. "I was afraid that I did not. You have had so much to worry you of late."
"Yes," he sighed. "But when we are alone I can forget it all. Play something for me, please."
She looked at him in surprise: "When did you ask me to play, before?"
"I don't know," he answered frankly. "You most always play without my asking. Sing an old song, something we used to sing long ago."
She went to the piano and touched to life the strains of "Kitty Clyde." And when her voice arose, he felt a lump in his throat, and he sat with his eyes shut, with a picture in his heart—an old house, a honey-suckle, a beautiful girl in white, with a rose in her hair.
CHAPTER XVII.
At the Creek.
Shortly after Sawyer took his leave, Lyman went out for a meditative stroll in the wooded land. About a mile and a half distant was a creek, with great bluffs on one side, and with a romantic tumble of land on the other. Of late he had gone often to this stream, not to listen to the melody of water pouring over the rocks, not to hear the birds that held a joy-riot in the trees, but to lie in the grass on a slope, beneath an elm, and gaze across at a limestone tower called "Lover's Leap." And on these journeys he always went through the shaded lane-like street that led past the banker's house. It was the most pretentious house in the town, of brick, trimmed with stone. In the yard, which was large, the great man had indulged his taste for art, stucco statuary—a deer, a lion, a dog, two Greek wrestlers, a mother with a child in her arms, and a ghastly semblance of Andrew Jackson.