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It would have been noticeable to any less celestial-minded observer than Mr. Withers the diffidence with which Thane, in asking after Miss Daphne Lewis, pronounced that young person’s name. He did not wait for the old gentleman to finish his explanation of her absence, but having learned the way she had gone, dropped himself at a great pace down the gulch and came upon her unawares, where she had been sitting, overcome by nameless fears and a creeping horror of the place. She started to her feet, for Thane’s was no furtive tread that crashed through the thorny greasewood and planted itself, a yard at a bound, amongst the stones. The horror vanished and a flush of life, a light of joy, returned to her speaking face. He had never seen her so completely off her guard. He checked himself suddenly and caught his hat from his head; and without thinking, before he replaced it, he drew the back of his soft leather glove across his dripping forehead. The unconventional action touched her keenly. She was sensitively subject to outward impressions, and “the plastic” had long been her delight, her ambition, and her despair.

“Oh, if I could only have done something simple like that!” the defeated, unsatisfied artist soul within her cried. “That free, arrested stride, how splendid! and the hat crumpled in his hand, and his bare head and strong brows in the sunlight, and the damp points of hair clinging to his temples! No, he is not bald,–that was only a tonsure of white light on the top of his head; still, he must be hard on forty. It is the end of summer with him, too; and here he comes for water, thirsting, to satisfy himself where water was plentiful in spring, and he finds a dry bed of stones. Call it The End of Summer; it is enough. Ah, if I could ever have thought out an action as simple and direct as that–and drawn it! But how can one draw what one has never seen!”

Not all this, but something else, something more that Daphne could not have put into words, spoke in the look which Thane surprised. It was but a flash between long lashes that fell instantly and put it out; but no woman whose heart was in the grave ever looked at a living man in that way, and the living man could not help but know it. It took away his self-possession for a moment; he stood speechless, gazing into her face with a question in his eyes which five minutes before he would have declared an insult to her.

Daphne struggled to regain her mask, but the secret had escaped: shameless Nature had seized her opportunity.

“How did I miss you?” she asked with forced coolness, as they turned up the gulch together. For the moment she had forgotten about the spring.

Thane briefly explained the mistake that had been made, adding, “You will have to put up with another day of us, now,–perhaps two.”

“And where do you leave us, then?” asked Daphne stupidly.

“At the same place,–Decker’s Ferry, you know.” He smiled, indulgent to her crass ignorance of roads and localities. “Only we shall be a day longer getting there. We are still on the south side of the river, you remember?”

“Oh, of course!” said Daphne, who remembered nothing of the kind.

“It was a brutal fake, our springing this place on you for Pilgrim Station,” he murmured.

“It has all been a mistake,–our coming, I mean; at least I think so.”

It was some comfort to Thane to hear her say it,–he had been so forcibly of that opinion himself all along; but he allowed the admission to pass.

“It must have been a hard journey for you,” he exerted himself to say, speaking in a surface voice, while his thoughts were sinking test-pits through layers of crusted consciousness into depths of fiery nature underneath.