Mayfield had never before noticed. The house was certainly bleak and
exposed; the site by no means a poetical one. She wondered if she had
not put a romance into it, and perhaps even into the man beside her,
which did not belong to either. It was a moment of dangerous doubt.

"I don't know but that you're right, Mr. Jeff," she said finally, as
they faced the hill, and began the ascent together. "This place is a
little queer, and bleak, and--unattractive."

"Yes, miss," said Jeff, with direct simplicity, "I've always wondered
what you saw in it to make you content to stay, when it would be so much
prettier, and more suitable for you at the 'Summit.'"

Miss Mayfield bit her lip, and was silent. After a few moments' climbing
she said, almost pettishly, "Where is this famous 'Summit'?"

Jeff stopped. They had reached the top of the hill. He pointed across
an olive-green chasm to a higher level, where, basking in the declining
sun, clustered the long rambling outbuildings around the white blinking
facade of the "Summit House." Framed in pines and hemlocks, tender with
soft gray shadows, and nestling beyond a foreground of cultivated slope,
it was a charming rustic picture.

Miss Mayfield's quick eye took in its details. Her quick intellect
took in something else. She had seated herself on the road-bank, and,
clasping her knees between her locked fingers, she suddenly looked up
at Jeff. "What possessed you to come half-way up a mountain, instead of
going on to the top?"

"Poverty, miss!"