gently for a half mile or so, covered, by modern prosperity, with a
small, stanch town, and bordered by a pretty river winding among meadows
of hay and grain. At the northern end, instead of this gentle decline,
was a precipitous cliff side, close to whose brow a wooden bench, that
ran half-way round a vast sidewalk tree, commanded a view of the valley
embracing nearly three-quarters of the compass.

In civilian's dress, and with only his sea-bronzed face and the polished
air of a pivot gun to tell that he was of the navy, Lieutenant Godfrey
Winslow was slowly crossing the rural way with Ruth Byington at his
side. He had the look of, say, twenty-eight, and she was some four years
his junior. From her father's front gate they were passing toward the
large grove garden of the young man's own home, on the side next the
hill and the sunset. On the front porch, where the two had just left
him, sat the war-crippled father of the girl, taking pride in the
placidity of the face she once or twice turned to him in profile,
and in the buoyancy of her movements and pose.

His fond, unspoken thought went after her, that she was hiding some care
again,--her old, sweet trick, and her mother's before her.

He looked on to Godfrey. "There's endurance," he thought again. "You
ought to have taken him long ago, my good girl, if you want him at all."
And here his reflections faded into the unworded belief that she would
have done so but for his, her own father's, being in the way.

The pair stopped and turned half about to enjoy the green-arched vista
of the street, and Godfrey said, in a tone that left his companion no
room to overlook its personal intent, "How often, in my long absences,
I see this spot!"