"Do you like this sort of thing?" Stainton heard himself asking the girl during one of the morning walks that he was permitted to take with her, unescorted, through Central Park. "What sort of thing?" asked Muriel. "A day like this? I love it!" It was a day worthy of being loved: one of those crisp autumnal days when New York is at its best and when the air, from the earth to the clear blue zenith, has a crystal clarity and a bracing tang that none other of the world's great cities possesses. Stainton felt as he used on some Rocky Mountain peak with the crests of lower eminences rolling away to the horizon like the waves of an inland sea below him; and Muriel, her cheeks glowing, walked by his side more like some firm-breasted nymph of those forests than a child of modern days and metropolitan civilisation. "Yes," said Stainton, "this is splendid. But I meant the whole thing: New York, the life here, the city." "I love that, too," said Muriel. To Stainton's ear the use of one's first Latin verb translated was not merely schoolgirl carelessness and want of variety of phrase; it was an accurate expression of her abounding capacity for intense affection, her splendid fortune of emotion and her equally splendid generosity in its disposal. "So do I," he said. "You can't begin to know how much it means to me to get back here." "From the West?" Her eyes were soft at this. "But the West must be so romantic." "Scarcely that. It has its points, but romance is not one of them." "Oh, but your life there was romantic." She nodded wisely. "I know," she said. Stainton's smile was tenderly indulgent. "How did you get that idea?" he asked. "Auntie Ethel has told me some of the brave things you did, and so has Uncle Preston." "They have been reading some of the silly stories that the papers published when I made my big find. You mustn't believe all that the newspapers say." "I believe these things," affirmed Muriel. "Wasn't that true about the time you rescued the man from the lynchers at Grand Junction?" "Grand Joining. I didn't read it," said Stainton. "But did you do it?" "Oh, there was something of the sort." He honestly disliked to have his supposedly heroic exploits praised, only from modesty perhaps, perhaps from a super-sensitive consciousness that they were the results rather of fear than of bravery. "Look at that sky. Isn't it glorious?" "Then about the express robbery on the Rio Grande," said Muriel; "they said you went after the robbers when the sheriff and his men were afraid to go, and you captured them by yourself--three of them." Stainton laughed, his broad, white teeth showing. "The sheriff and his men," he said, "were along with me. It was not half so exciting as that play last night. Didn't you like the play?" "I loved it. But, Mr. Stainton----" "Yes?" "Won't you tell me about some of these things?" "I am sure they are much more interesting in the form in which the newspapers presented them."