"I want that you should be a little sorry when all this comes to an end."
"You mean when we leave Chamouni?"
"Yes."
"I shall be sorry then," said Miss Ruth frankly, "but I am not going to be sorry beforehand."
There was something very sweet to Lynde in her candor, but there was also something that restrained him for the moment from being as explicit as he had intended. He rode on awhile without speaking, watching the girl as the mule now and then turned the sharp angle of the path and began a new ascent. This movement always brought her face to face with him a moment—she on the grade above, and he below. Miss Ruth had grown accustomed to the novel situation, and no longer held on by the pommel of the saddle. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, pliantly lending herself to the awkward motion of the animal. Over her usual travelling-habit she had thrown the long waterproof which reached to her feet. As she sat there in a half-listless attitude, she was the very picture of the Queen of Sheba seated upon Deacon Twombly's mare. Lynde could not help seeing it; but he was schooling himself by degrees to this fortuitous resemblance. It was painful, but it was inevitable, and he would get used to it in time. "Perhaps," he mused, "if I had never had that adventure with the poor insane girl, I might not have looked twice at Miss Denham when we met—and loved her. It was the poor little queen who shaped my destiny, and I oughtn't to be ungrateful." He determined to tell the story to Miss Ruth some time when a fitting occasion offered.
It was only when the likeness flashed upon Lynde suddenly, as it had done in the grove the previous day, that it now had the power to startle him. At the present moment it did not even seriously annoy him. In an idle, pensive way he noted the coincidence of the man leading the mule. The man was Morton and the mule was Mary! Lynde smiled to himself at the reflection that Mary would probably not accept the analogy with very good grace if she knew about it. This carried him to Rivermouth; then he thought of Cinderella's slipper, packed away in the old hair-trunk in the closet, and how perfectly the slipper would fit one of those feet which a floating fold of the waterproof that instant revealed to him—and he was in Switzerland again.
"Miss Ruth," he said, looking up quickly and urging his mule as closely behind hers as was practicable, "what are your plans to be when your uncle comes?"
"When my uncle comes we shall have no plans—aunt Gertrude and I. Uncle
Denham always plans for everybody."
"I don't imagine he will plan for me," said Lynde gloomily. "I wish he would, for I shall not know what to do with myself."
"I thought you were going to St. Petersburg."