“And do they take any notice of you? Nature always seems to me careless and indifferent.” “They invite me to come up and lie down on their great sides where the sun has lain all day before me. Yes, they always smile upon me.” “Do not go,--at least until the mamma and I go with you.” “I should not be afraid alone.” No,--fear had never found the depths of those liquid, lucent eyes, he thought. “The mountains might be civil enough,” he rejoined, “and give you their purple berries to eat, their wild white brooks to drink; but I could not answer for the black bears and snakes.” “I think I could.” “And this, of course, is only what you interpret the hills to mean, sitting there in their grim conclave and affording us such a narrow coronal of sky?” asked Reymund, smiling. “I do not know,” she answered doubtfully. “I said things were real to me.” “There must have been those like you, who first saw and believed in fairies and all the goblin people,” he said, still smiling. “My father died before I was born,” said Orient. “Perhaps that gave me some lien upon the spiritual world.” “Then you see bogles as well as other things,--as well as the personalities of bud and bird and granite pile? Uncanny creature! What pleasure shall I take in meeting your glance when it rests also on a dead man behind me, and on the fetch of one about to join the innumerable caravan beside me? I must take my revenge normally and in kind,--if I die before you, you shall surely have a visitation from me. How should you like that?” “You would be just as welcome then as now,” she answered gravely. “An equivocal compliment. Nevertheless, I accept it as a challenge. Will you promise its counterpart?” “When I die,” said Orient, “I shall have other things to do.” “But I would like to see a ghost, just to be assured that there are such things.” “As if there could be any doubt!” “You understand, then,” he said, as she went in under the low woodbine-curtained door, “that at some time--when time shall be no more--I will cast my shadow at your feet!” It was an hour later that, while he still strolled in the short, wet grass and enjoyed the rich, half-dusky atmosphere, he heard Orient singing gently from her window, as she leaned out upon the cool, star-sown air, and the song seemed to belong to her, like a natural expression, as to the night the night-wind, or to the dark the dew:-- “In the evening over me leaning, Often I fancy a waving wing, And with the warning of blushing morning Softly glimmers the same fair thing. “O bright being, beyond the seeing Of aught but the spirit that feels you near, Your white star leaving, and earthward cleaving, You break the murk of this mortal sphere. “Still, sweet stranger, in peace or danger, Out of the air above me bloom, And heaven’s own sweetness in such completeness Drop on my head from your shining plume!”