He looked at the graceful, bending figure and lifted his brows; then,
quickening his pace until he was up with the coach, he spoke to the negro
upon the box. "Tyre, drive on to that big pine, and wait there for your
mistress and me. Sidon,"--to the footman,--"get down and take my horse. If
your master wakes, tell him that Mistress Evelyn tired of the coach, and
that I am picking her a nosegay."

Tyre and Sidon, Haward's steed, the four black coach horses, the
vermilion-and-cream coach, and the slumbering Colonel, all made a progress
of an hundred yards to the pine-tree, where the cortége came to a halt.
Mistress Evelyn looked up from the flower-gathering to find the road bare
before her, and Haward, sitting upon a log, watching her with something
between a smile and a frown.

"You think that I, also, weigh true love by the weight of the purse," he
said. "I do not care overmuch for your gold, Evelyn."

She did not answer at once, but stood with her head slightly bent,
fingering the waxen flowers with a delicate, lingering touch. Now that
there was no longer the noise of the wheels and the horses' hoofs, the
forest stillness, which is composed of sound, made itself felt. The call
of birds, the whir of insects, the murmur of the wind in the treetops,
low, grave, incessant, and eternal as the sound of the sea, joined
themselves to the slow waves of fragrance, the stretch of road whereon
nothing moved, the sunlight lying on the earth, and made a spacious quiet.

"I think that there is nothing for which you care overmuch," she said at
last. "Not for gold or the lack of it, not for friends or for enemies, not
even for yourself."