Glancing up at her companion from time to time, Constance saw the color coming to his face, and he strode beside her quite steadily. Whatever was his inheritance, his certainly were stamina and vitality; a little less—or a little dissipation of them—and he might not have recovered at all, much less have leaped back to strength as he had done. For since yesterday, the languor which had held him was gone.
They halted a minute near the south entrance of the park at the St. Gaudens' "Lincoln," which he had not previously seen. The gaunt, sad figure of the "rail-splitter" in his ill-fitting clothes, seemed to recall something to him; for he glanced swiftly at her as they turned away.
"Miss Sherrill," he asked, "have you ever stayed out in the country?"
"I go to northern Michigan, up by the straits, almost every summer for part of the time, at least; and once in a while we open the house in winter too for a week or so. It's quite wild—trees and sand and shore and the water. I've had some of my best times up there."
"You've never been out on the plains?"
"Just to pass over them on the train on the way to the coast."
"That would be in winter or in spring; I was thinking about the plains in late summer, when we—Jim and Betty, the children of the people I was with in Kansas—"
"I remember them."
"When we used to play at being pioneers in our sunflower shacks."
"Sunflower shacks?" she questioned.