He looked away from her, and then, turning, waited for the oxen to reach the summit of the hill. "You'd better get in now, I think," he said; "there is a long walk ahead of us, and if my team is slow it is sure also." As he brought the oxen to a halt, she laid her hand for an instant on his arm, and, mounting lightly upon the wheel, stepped into the cart. "Now give me Agag," she said, and he handed her the little dog before he took up the ropes and settled himself beside her on the driver's seat. "You look like one of the disinherited princesses in the old stories mother tells," he observed. A puzzled wonder was in her face as she turned toward him. "Who are you? And what has Blake Hall to do with your family?" she asked. "Only that it was named after us. We used to live there." "Within your recollection?" He nodded, with his eyes on the slow oxen. "Then you have not always been a farmer?" "Ever since I was ten years old." "I can't understand, I can't understand," she said, perplexed. "You are like no one about here; you are like no one I have ever seen." "Then I must be like you," he returned bluntly. "Like me? Oh, heavens, no; you would make three of me--body, brain, and soul. I believe, when I think of it, that you are the biggest man I've ever known--and by that I don't mean in height-- for I have seen men with a greater number of physical inches. Inches, somehow, have very little to do with the impression--and so has muscle, strong as yours is. It is simple bigness that I am talking about, and it was the first thing I noticed in you--" "At the cross-roads?" he asked, and instantly regretted his words. "No; not at the cross-roads," she answered, smiling. "You have a good memory; but mine is better. I saw you once on a June morning, when I was riding along the road with the chestnuts and you were standing out in the field." "I did not see you or I should have remembered," he said quietly. Silence fell between them, and he was conscious in every fiber of his body--that he had never been so close to her before--had never felt the touch of her arm upon his own, nor the folds of her skirt brushing against his knees. A gust of wind whipped the end of her veil into his face, and when she turned to recapture it he felt her warm breath on his cheek. The sense of her nearness pervaded him from head to foot, and an unrest like that produced by the spring wind troubled his heart. He did not look at her, and yet he saw her full dark eyes and the curve of her white throat more distinctly than he beheld the blue sky at which he gazed. Was it possible that she, too, shared his disquietude? he wondered, or was the silence that she kept as undisturbed as her tranquil pose? "I should not have forgotten it," he repeated presently, turning to meet her glance.