Keith began to scold her, but she laughed at him.
He had done it often, she said, and what he could do she could do.
The beauty of the wide landscape sank into both their minds, and after a little they both took a graver tone.
"Tell me where your old home is," she said presently, after a long pause in which her face had grown thoughtful. "You told me once that you could see it from this rock."
Keith pointed to a spot on the far horizon. He did not know that it was to see this even more than to brave him that she had climbed to the top of the rock.
"Now tell me about it," she said. "Tell me all over what you have told me before." And Keith related all he could remember. Touched with her sympathy, he told it with more feeling than he had ever shown before. When he spoke of the loss of his home, of his mortification, and of his father's quiet dignity, she turned her face away to keep him from seeing the tears that were in her eyes.
"I can understand your feeling a little," she said presently; "but I did not know that any one could have so much feeling for a plantation. I suppose it is because it is in the country, with its trees and flowers and little streams. We have had three houses since I can remember. The one that we have now on Fifth Avenue is four times as large--yes, six times as large--and a hundred times as fine as the one I can first remember, and yet, somehow, I always think, when I am sad or lonely, of the little white house with the tiny rooms in it, with their low ceilings and small windows, where I used to go when I was a very little girl to see my father's mother. Mamma does not care for it; she was brought up in the city; but I think my father loves it just as I do. He always says he is going to buy it back, and I am going to make him do it."
"I am going to buy back mine some day," said Keith, very slowly.
She glanced at him. His eyes were fastened on the far-off horizon, and there was that in his face which she had never seen there before, and which made her admire him more than she had ever done.
"I hope you will," she said. She almost hated Ferdy Wickersham for having spoken of the place as Keith told her he had spoken.