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“It was here I first met your mother,” continued Drayton, taking his place beside her. “We often sat together on this very rock. I was a young fellow then, scarcely older than you, and very full of romance and enthusiasm. Your mother–“. He paused a moment, looking at his companion with a grave smile in his eyes. “If I had been as dear to her as she was to me,” he went on, “you would have been our daughter.”

Mary looked out upon the bathers, and upon the azure bay, and into her own virgin heart. “Are you married, too?” she asked at length.

“I was cut out for an old bachelor, and I have been true to my destiny,” was his reply. “Besides, I’ve lived abroad till a month or two ago, and good Americans don’t marry foreign wives.”

“I should like to go abroad,” said Mary Leithe.

“It is the privilege of Americans,” said Drayton. “Other people are born abroad, and never know the delight of real travel. But, after all, America is best. The life of the world culminates here. We are the prow of the vessel; there may be more comfort amidships, but we are the first to touch the unknown seas. And the foremost men of all nations are foremost only in so far as they are at heart American; that is to say, America is, at present, even more an idea and a principle than it is a country. The nation has perhaps not yet risen to the height of its opportunities. So you have never crossed the Atlantic?”

“No; my father never wanted to go; and after he died, mamma could not.”

“Well, our American Emerson says, you know, that, as the good of travel respects only the mind, we need not depend for it on railways and steamboats.”

“It seems to me, if we never moved ourselves, our minds would never really move either.”

“Where would you most care to go?”

“To Rome, and Jerusalem, and Egypt, and London.”

“Why?”

“They seem like parts of my mind that I shall never know unless I visit them.”

“Is there no part of the world that answers to your heart?”

“Oh, the beautiful parts everywhere, I suppose.”

“I can well believe it,” said Drayton, but with so much simplicity and straightforwardness that Mary Leithe’s cheeks scarcely changed color. “And there is beauty enough here,” he added, after a pause.

“Yes; I have always liked this place,” said she, “though the cottages seem a pity.”

“You knew the old farm-house, then?”

“Oh, yes; I used to play in the farm-yard when I was a little girl. After my father died, Mamma used to come here every year. And my aunt has a cottage here now. You haven’t met my aunt, Mr. Drayton?”

“I wished to know you first. But now I want to know her, and to become one of the family. There is no one left, I find, who belongs to me. What would you think of me for a bachelor uncle?”

“I would like it very much,” said Mary, with a smile.

“Then let us begin,” returned Drayton.

Several days passed away very pleasantly. Never was there a bachelor uncle so charming, as Haymaker would have said, as Drayton. The kind of life in the midst of which he found himself was altogether novel and delightful to him. In some aspects it was like enjoying for the first time a part of his existence which he should have enjoyed in youth, but had missed; and in many ways he doubtless enjoyed it more now than he would have done then, for he brought it to a maturity of experience which had taught him the inestimable value of simple things; a quiet nobility of character and clearness of knowledge that enabled him to perceive and follow the right course in small things as in great; a serene yet cordial temperament that rendered him the cheerfulest and most trustworthy of companions; a generous and masculine disposition, as able to direct as to comply; and years which could sympathize impartially with youth and age, and supply something which each lacked. He, meanwhile, sometimes seemed to himself to be walking in a dream. The region in which he was living, changed, yet so familiar, the thought of being once more, after so many years of homeless wandering, in his own land and among his own countrymen, and the companionship of Mary Leithe, like, yet so unlike, the Mary Cleveland he had known and loved, possessing in reality all the tenderness and lovely virginal sweetness that he had imagined in the other, with a warmth of heart that rejuvenated his own, and a depth and freshness of mind answering to the wisdom that he had drawn from experience, and rendering her, though in her different and feminine sphere, his equal–all these things made Drayton feel as if he would either awake and find them the phantasmagoria of a beautiful dream, or as if the past time were the dream, and this the reality. Certainly, in this ardent, penetrating light of the present, the past looked vaporous and dim, like a range of mountains scaled long ago and vanishing on the horizon.