“I—I’m sorry——” she faltered.... “You’ll think me silly—think evil of me, perhaps——”
She looked into his troubled eyes, then suddenly she took her face into both hands and covered it, sitting very still.
“We’ll go South together,” he said in an uncertain voice.... “I hope you will try to think of me as a friend.... I’m just troubled because I am so anxious to understand you. That is all.... I’m—I’m troubled, too, because I am anxious that you should think well of me. Will you try, always?”
She nodded.
“I want to be your friend, always,” he said.
“Thank you, Mr. Cleves.”
It was a strange spot he chose for Tressa—strange but lovely in its own unreal and rather spectral fashion—where a pearl-tinted mist veiled the St. Johns, and made exquisite ghosts of the palmettos, and softened the sun to a silver-gilt wafer pasted on a nacre sky.
It was a still country, where giant water-oaks towered, fantastic under their misty camouflage of moss, and swarming with small birds.
Among the trees the wood-ibis stole; without on the placid glass of the stream the eared grebe floated. There was no wind, no stirring of leaves, no sound save the muffled splash of silver mullet, the breathless whirr of a humming-bird, or the hushed rustle of lizards in the woods.