higher, colder, purer air; though he had brought her body thence, he would
not have her spirit leave the climbing earth, the dreamlike summits, for
the hot and dusty plain. The plain, God knew, had dwellers enough.

She was a thing of wild and sylvan grace, and there was fulfillment in a
dark beauty all her own of the promise she had given as a child. About her
was a pathos, too,--the pathos of the flower taken from its proper soil,
and drooping in earth which nourished it not. Haward, looking at her,
watching the sensitive, mobile lips, reading in the dark eyes, beneath the
felicity of the present, a hint and prophecy of woe, felt for her a pity
so real and great that for the moment his heart ached as for some sorrow
of his own. She was only a young girl, poor and helpless, born of poor
and helpless parents dead long ago. There was in her veins no gentle
blood; she had none of the world's goods; her gown was torn, her feet went
bare. She had youth, but not its heritage of gladness: beauty, but none to
see it; a nature that reached toward light and height, and for its home
the house which he had lately left. He was a man older by many years than
the girl beside him, knowing good and evil; by instinct preferring the
former, but at times stooping, open-eyed, to that degree of the latter
which a lax and gay world held to be not incompatible with a convention
somewhat misnamed "the honor of a gentleman." Now, beneath the beech-tree
in the forest which touched upon one side the glebe, upon the other his
own lands, he chose at this time the good; said to himself, and believed
the thing he said, that in word and in deed he would prove himself her
friend.

Putting out his hand he drew her down upon the leaves; and she sat beside
him, still and happy, ready to answer him when he asked her this or that,
readier yet to sit in blissful, dreamy silence. She was as pure as the
flower which she held in her hand, and most innocent in her imaginings.