"Don't I?" said Faith. "And I am going to do it more. What expedition are you going on, Endecott?"
"Up to Kildeer river—I have business there. Will you trust yourself to me in a boat—if I will let you steer?"
"I'll do anything to go," said Faith. "And I suppose if I steered wrong, the helm would come about pretty quick!" And so ended her last early morning studies.
It was in the afternoon of the same day that Faith put in practice what she had been thinking of when she avowed her determination of further studying Mr. Linden. He had come home from school, and it was the dusky hour again; the pleasant interregnum between day and night when even busy folk take a little time to think and rest. Mr. Linden was indulging in both apparently; he was in one of those quiet times of doing nothing which Faith chose for making any of her very gentle attacks upon him. One seemed to be in meditation now. She stole up behind him and leaned down on the back of his chair, after her wont.
"Endecott"—she said softly.
Faith's voice was in ordinary a pleasant thing to hear; but this name from her lips was always a concretion of sweetness, flavoured differently as the case might be. Sometimes with mere gladness, sometimes with the spirit of fun, often enough with a little timidity, and sometimes with a rose-drop from the very bottom of her heart's well; with various compounds of the same. But this time it was more than timidity; Faith's one word was spoken as from lips that were positively afraid to follow it with others.
"That note," said Mr. Linden smiling, "seems to come from the top of a primeval pine tree—with a hawk in sight! Little bird, will you please come down into the lower regions of air?—where you can be (comparatively) safe."
Faith laughed; but the hawk remained in sight—of her words.
"You said this morning I never asked you any but impossible things."
"Most sorrowfully true!—have you another one ready?"