"On the contrary, it is _the_ one thing warranted by the best usage. Out-of-doors is now in the fashion. Doctors preach it, preachers expound it, legislators enact it, and the whole people make it a decree _plebiscite_. Clara sits with me for hours under the trees--" "Oh, does she!" interrupted poor Mell, with a pang. Seeing her way to a question she had long been wanting to ask, she subjoined quickly: "And what do you think of Clara Rutland, Jerome? Do you call her an interesting girl?" "I never have called her that," replied Jerome, "never that I know of, but--she'll do. One thing, she can talk a fellow stone blind at one sitting. But that's nothing. Starlings and ravens can talk, too." At the end of this speech, Mell was doubly anxious to know Jerome's real opinion of Clara Rutland. It seemed to her that the question was more open at both ends than it ever had been before. Jerome patted his horse's head, told him to "Be quiet, sir!" and resumed the threads of discourse. "What was I saying? Oh, yes! We live out of doors at the Bigge House. There wouldn't be any use for a house there at all, if it wasn't for bad weather. Those girls try their best to be agreeable, but none of them are _provoquante_ and charming, like you, Mell. While they sleep away the sweetest hours of these golden summer mornings, what harm is there in you and I enjoying pleasant converse together in the green fields, inhaling the pure air of heaven? I promise you to be on my best behavior. I promise you to uphold the integrity of the tip end of that little finger inviolate; and so you will be on hand without fail, Mell, and so will I, and so will something else." "What else, Jerome?" He bent low from his saddle-bow to whisper into her ear: "That supreme happiness which is present everywhere when you and I are together. Be sure to come, darling. And now, once more, good-night!" He galloped off, leaving Mell standing in the gateway, and on the uncomfortable side of a very knotty point. Did Jerome really love her? She believed he did--ardently. Did he love her well enough to surmount those difficulties of which he had spoken? Did he love her well enough to marry her? "Aye, there's the rub!" cried Mell. Her mind fairly swarmed with ugly suspicions, some of them as infinitesimal, and at the same time as dangerous as those microscopic bacteria which enter the physical laboratory, disorganizing, and, if not quickly eliminated, destroying the very stronghold of life itself. And as biological analysis was not yet, at that time, practiced as a method of research into the germs of things, Mell must needs fall back entirely upon inferential deductions.