"Yes, sir, you've been dreaming again! You needn't pretend you were thinking--you don't know how to think. Thinking is not romantic enough. I have been here watching you for a long time, and I know just how romantic the dreams are that you have been dreaming. I could tell by the way you turned,--this way and that,--looking up and down the river. It always bewitches you when the sun goes and the shadows come. I knew I should find you here, just like this; and I came on purpose to wake and scold you." She pretended to draw her pretty brow into a frown, but she could not help smiling. "Seriously, dear, you must stop dreaming. It is a dreadful thing to be a dreamer in a new country. State makers should all be wide-awake workers. You are out of place here; as Uncle Philip Alston says--" "Then why did he put me here?" the boy burst out bitterly. "David!" she cried in wounded reproach, "how can you? It hurts me to hear you say things like that. I can't bear to hear any one say anything against him--I love him so. And from you--who owe him almost as much as I do--" The tears were very near. But she was a little angry, too, and her blue eyes flashed. "No; no one owes him so much--as myself. He couldn't have been so good--no one ever could be so good to any one else as he has always been to me. Still"--softening suddenly, for she was fond of the boy, and something in his sensitive face went to her tender heart--"think, David, dear, we owe him everything we have,--our names, our home, our clothes, our education, our very lives. We must never for a moment forget that it was he who found us all alone--you in a cabin on the Wilderness Road and me in a boat at Duff's Fort--and brought us in his own arms to Cedar House. And you know as well as I do that he would have given us a home in his own house if it had not been so rough and bare a place, a mere camp. And then there was no woman in it to take care of us, and we were only little mites of babies--poor, crying, helpless morsels of humanity. Where do you think we came from, David? I wonder and wonder and wonder!" wistfully, with her gaze on the darkening river. It was an old question, and one that they had been asking themselves and one another and every one, over and over, ever since they had been old enough to think. The short story which Philip Alston had told was all that he or any one knew or ever was to know. The boy silently shook his head. The girl went on:--