"Listen, how would this be for a site? (Let me stick some more wood there on your side of the fire.) Once when I was up in the high Sierras, in California, I found a wooded bluff—you looked a thousand feet straight down to a clear lake, green as mint-sauce pretty nearly, not a wrinkle on it. There wasn't a sound anywhere except when the leaves rustled. Then on the other side you looked way up to a peak covered with snow, and a big eagle sailing overhead—sailing and sailing, hour after hour. And you could smell the pine needles and sit there and look way off——Would you like it?"

"Oh, I can't tell you how much!"

"Have to go there some day."

"When you're president of the VanZile Company you must give me a Touricar to go in, and perhaps I shall let you go, too."

"Right! I'll be chauffeur and cook and everything." Quietly exultant at her sweet, unworded promise of liking, he hastily said, to cover that thrill, "Even a poor old low-brow mechanic like me does get a kind of poetic fervor out of a view like that."

"But you aren't a low-brow mechanic. You make me so dreadfully weary when you're mock-humble. As a matter of fact, you're a famous man and I'm a poor little street waif. For instance, the way you talk about socialism when you get interested and let yourself go. Really excited. I'd always thought that aviators and other sorts of heroes were such stolid dubs."

"Gee! it'd be natural enough if I did like to talk. Imagine the training in being with the English superintendent at the mine, that I was telling you about, and hearing Frazer lecture, and knowing Tony Bean with his South-American interests, and most of all, of course, knowing Forrest Haviland. If I had any pep in me——Course I'm terribly slangy, I suppose, but I couldn't help wading right in and wanting to talk to everybody about everything."

"Yes. Yes. Of course I'm abominably slangy, too. I wonder if every one isn't, except in books.... We've left our house a little unfinished, Carl."

"I'm afraid we'll have to, blessed. We'll have to be going. It's past seven, now; and we must be sure to catch the 8.09 and get back to town about nine."

"I can't tell you how sorry I am we must leave our house in the wilds."