feminine half of the company. Mr. Striker presented himself, sacrificing a morning’s work, with a magnanimity greater even than Roderick’s, and foreign support was further secured in the person of Mr. Whitefoot, the young Orthodox minister. Roderick had chosen the feasting-place; he knew it well and had passed many a summer afternoon there, lying at his length on the grass and gazing at the blue undulations of the horizon. It was a meadow on the edge of a wood, with mossy rocks protruding through the grass and a little lake on the other side. It was a cloudless August day; Rowland always remembered it, and the scene, and everything that was said and done, with extraordinary distinctness. Roderick surpassed himself in friendly jollity, and at one moment, when exhilaration was at the highest, was seen in Mr. Striker’s high white hat, drinking champagne from a broken tea-cup to Mr. Striker’s health. Miss Striker had her father’s pale blue eye; she was dressed as if she were going to sit for her photograph, and remained for a long time with Roderick on a little promontory overhanging the lake. Mrs. Hudson sat all day with a little meek, apprehensive smile. She was afraid of an “accident,” though unless Miss Striker (who indeed was a little of a romp) should push Roderick into the lake, it was hard to see what accident could occur. Mrs. Hudson was as neat and crisp and uncrumpled at the end of the festival as at the beginning. Mr. Whitefoot, who but a twelvemonth later became a convert to episcopacy and was already cultivating a certain conversational sonority, devoted himself to Cecilia. He had a little book in his pocket, out of which he read to her at intervals, lying stretched at her feet, and it was a lasting joke with Cecilia, afterwards, that she would never tell what Mr. Whitefoot’s little book had been. Rowland had placed himself near Miss Garland, while the feasting went forward on the grass. She wore a so-called gypsy hat—a little straw hat, tied down over her ears, so as to cast her eyes into shadow, by a ribbon passing outside of it. When the company dispersed, after lunch, he proposed to her to take a stroll in the wood. She hesitated a moment and looked toward Mrs. Hudson, as if for permission to leave her. But Mrs. Hudson was listening to Mr. Striker, who sat gossiping to her with relaxed magniloquence, his waistcoat unbuttoned and his hat on his nose.
“You can give your cousin your society at any time,” said Rowland. “But me, perhaps, you ‘ll never see again.”
“Why then should we wish to be friends, if nothing is to come of it?” she asked, with homely logic. But by this time she had consented, and they were treading the fallen pine-needles.
“Oh, one must take all one can get,” said Rowland. “If we can be friends for half an hour, it ‘s so much gained.”
“Do you expect never to come back to Northampton again?”
“‘Never’ is a good deal to say. But I go to Europe for a long stay.”
“Do you prefer it so much to your own country?”
“I will not say that. But I have the misfortune to be a rather idle man, and in Europe the burden of idleness is less heavy than here.”
She was silent for a few minutes; then at last, “In that, then, we are better than Europe,” she said. To a certain point Rowland agreed with her, but he demurred, to make her say more.
“Would n’t it be better,” she asked, “to work to get reconciled to America, than to go to Europe to get reconciled to idleness?”
“Doubtless; but you know work is hard to find.”
“I come from a little place where every one has plenty,” said Miss Garland. “We all work; every one I know works. And really,” she added presently, “I look at you with curiosity; you are the first unoccupied man I ever saw.”
“Don’t look at me too hard,” said Rowland, smiling. “I shall sink into the earth. What is the name of your little place?”
“West Nazareth,” said Miss Garland, with her usual sobriety. “It is not so very little, though it ‘s smaller than Northampton.”
“I wonder whether I could find any work at West Nazareth,” Rowland said.
“You would not like it,” Miss Garland declared reflectively. “Though there are far finer woods there than this. We have miles and miles of woods.”
“I might chop down trees,” said Rowland. “That is, if you allow it.”
“Allow it? Why, where should we get our firewood?” Then, noticing that he had spoken jestingly, she glanced at him askance, though with no visible diminution of her gravity. “Don’t you know how to do anything? Have you no profession?”
Rowland shook his head. “Absolutely none.”
“What do you do all day?”
“Nothing worth relating. That ‘s why I am going to Europe. There, at least, if I do nothing, I shall see a great deal; and if I ‘m not a producer, I shall at any rate be an observer.”
“Can’t we observe everywhere?”
“Certainly; and I really think that in that way I make the most of my opportunities. Though I confess,” he continued, “that I often remember there are things to be seen here to which I probably have n’t done justice. I should like, for instance, to see West Nazareth.”
She looked round at him, open-eyed; not, apparently, that she exactly supposed he was jesting, for the expression of such a desire was not necessarily facetious; but as if he must have spoken with an ulterior motive. In fact, he had spoken from the simplest of motives. The girl beside him pleased him unspeakably, and, suspecting that her charm was essentially her own and not reflected from social circumstance, he wished to give himself the satisfaction of contrasting her with the meagre influences of her education. Miss Garland’s second movement was to take him at his word. “Since you are free to do as you please, why don’t you go there?”
“I am not free to do as I please now. I have offered your cousin to bear him company to Europe, he has accepted with enthusiasm, and I cannot retract.”
“Are you going to Europe simply for his sake?”
Rowland hesitated a moment. “I think I may almost say so.”
Miss Garland walked along in silence. “Do you mean to do a great deal for him?” she asked at last.
“What I can. But my power of helping him is very small beside his power of helping himself.”
For a moment she was silent again. “You are very generous,” she said, almost solemnly.
“No, I am simply very shrewd. Roderick will repay me. It ‘s an investment. At first, I think,” he added shortly afterwards, “you would not have paid me that compliment. You distrusted me.”
She made no attempt to deny it. “I did n’t see why you should wish to make Roderick discontented. I thought you were rather frivolous.”
“You did me injustice. I don’t think I ‘m that.”
“It was because you are unlike other men—those, at least, whom I have seen.”
“In what way?”
“Why, as you describe yourself. You have no duties, no profession, no home. You live for your pleasure.”
“That ‘s all very true. And yet I maintain I ‘m not frivolous.”
“I hope not,” said Miss Garland, simply. They had reached a point where the wood-path forked and put forth two divergent tracks which
