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Fatigue seemed impossible to her. With Lennox as her companion she performed miracles in the way of walking and climbing, and explored the mountain fastnesses for miles around. Her step grew firm and elastic, her color richer, her laugh had a buoyant ring. She had never been so nearly a beautiful woman as she was sometimes when she came back to the cabin after a ramble, bright and sun-flushed, her hands full of laurel and vines.

“Your gown of ‘hodden-gray’ is wonderfully becoming, Beck,” Lennox said again and again with a secret exulting pride in her.

Their plans for the future took tone from their blissful, unconventional life. They could not settle down until they had seen the world. They would go here and there, and perhaps, if they found it pleasanter so, not settle down at all. There were certain clay-white, closely built villages, whose tumble-down houses jostled each other upon divers precipitous cliffs on the wayside between Florence and Rome, toward which Lennox’s compass seemed always to point. He rather argued that the fact of their not being dilated upon in the guide-books rendered them additionally interesting. Rebecca had her fancies too, and together they managed to talk a good deal of tender, romantic nonsense, which was purely their own business, and gave the summer days a delicate yet distinct flavor.

The evening after the sketch was made they spent upon the mountain side together. When they stopped to rest, Lennox flung himself upon the ground at Rebecca’s feet, and lay looking up at the far away blue of the sky in which a slow-flying bird circled lazily. Rebecca, with a cluster of pink and white laurel in her hand, proceeded with a metaphysical and poetical harangue she had previously begun.

“To my eyes,” she said, “it has a pathetic air of loneliness–pathetic and yet not exactly sorrowful. It knows nothing but its own pure, brave, silent life. It is only pathetic to a worldling–worldlings like us. How fallen we must be to find a life desolate because it has only nature for a companion!”

She stopped with an idle laugh, waiting for an ironical reply from the “worldling” at her feet; but he remained silent, still looking upward at the clear, deep blue.

As she glanced toward him she saw something lying upon the grass between them, and bent to pick it up. It was the sketch which he had forgotten and which had slipped from the portfolio.

“You have dropped something,” she said, and seeing what it was, uttered an exclamation of pleasure.

He came back to earth with a start, and, recognizing the sketch, looked more than half irritated.

“Oh, it is that, is it?” he said.

“It is perfect!” she exclaimed. “What a pictare it will make!”

“It is not to be a picture,” he answered. “It was not intended to be anything more than a sketch.”

“But why not?” she asked. “It is too good to lose. You never had such a model in your life before.”

“No,” he answered grudgingly.

The hand with which Rebecca held the sketch dropped. She turned her attention to her lover, and a speculative interest grew in her face.

“That girl”–she said slowly, after a mental summing up occupying a few seconds–“that girl irritates you–irritates you.”

He laughed faintly.

“I believe she does,” he replied; “yes, ‘irritates’ is the word to use.”

And yet if this were true, his first act upon returning home was a singular one.

He was rather late, but the girl Lodusky was sitting in the moonlight at the door. He stopped and spoke to her.

“If I should wish to paint you,” he said rather coldly, “would you do me the favor of sitting to me?”

She did not answer him at once, but seemed to weigh his words as she looked out across the moonlight.

“Ye mean, will I let ye put me in a picter?” she said at last.

He nodded.

“Yes,” she answered.

“I reckon he told ye he was a-paintin’ Dusk’s picter,” “Mis'” Harney said to her boarders a week later.