As they issued upon the pavement, the driver of a passing cab raised an interrogative whip. Atwood nodded, and a moment afterward they had edged into the traffic of one of the avenues and were rolling northward. To Jean, reveling silently in her first hansom, it seemed that they had scarcely started before they turned in at one of the entrances of Central Park, and for a time followed perforce the flashing afternoon parade before striking into a less frequented roadway, where they dismounted. Atwood, too, had said nothing amidst the jingling ostentation of the avenue and main-traveled drives, and he was silent now as they forsook the asphalt walks for quiet paths, where their feet trod the good earth, and the odor of leaf mold rose pungently. Presently he halted. "Will you shut your eyes for a little way?" he asked. "It's my whim." She assented, and they went forward slowly, her hand upon his sleeve. She felt the path drop, by gentle slopes at first, then with sharp turns past jutting rocks, where there seemed no path at all. Her sense of direction failed her, and with it went her recollection of the city's nearness. The immediate sounds were all sylvan. She heard the call of a cat-bird, the bark of a squirrel, the laughing whimper of a brook among stones, which she guessed, if her ear had not lost its woodcraft, merged its peevish identity in some neighboring lake or pool. "Now," said her guide, pausing. She looked, started, and rounded swiftly upon Atwood to find him beaming at her instant comprehension. "It might be the very same!" she exclaimed. "Mightn't it? The birches, the shore-line--" "And the stream, even the little stream! Could I find watercress _there_, I wonder?" The man laughed. "Ah, it is real to you! I, too, forgot New York when I first stumbled on it. I even _looked_ for watercress. But it knows no such purity, poor little brook! I've had to pretend with it, as I've pretended with the lake. The landscape-gardener was a clever fellow. He makes you believe there are distances out there--winding channels, unplumbed depths; he cheats you into thinking you have a forest at your back. Sometimes he has almost persuaded me to cast a clumsy line into that thicket yonder." Jean's look returned to him quickly. He was smiling, but with an undercurrent of gravity. "You know it well," she said. "I ought. It was here, the summer after we met, that I came to realize something of what I had asked you to do. I began to study refuges. I went to such as I could, boys' places, mainly; I even tried to get sight or word of you. Somehow, though, I never came at the right official, and it seemed that men weren't welcome. I learned a few things, however. I grubbed among reports; I found out what your daily life was like, what your companions must be, and once I saw a newspaper account of a riot. But of you I heard nothing. How could I? I did not even know your name--I, your judge!"