She started and looked away from the landscape. "You have long memories in this county, I know," she said. "So few things happen that it becomes a religion to cherish the little incidents. It may be that I, too, have inherited something of this, for I remember very clearly the few months I spent here." "You remembered them even while you were away?" "Why not?" she asked. "It is not the moving about, the strange places one sees, nor the people one meets, that really count in life, you know." "What is it?" he questioned abruptly. She hesitated as if trying to put her thoughts more clearly into words. "I think it is the things one learns," she said; "the places in which we take root and grow, and the people who teach us what is really worth while--patience, and charity, and the beauty there is in the simplest and most common lives when they are lived close to Nature." "In driving the plough or in picking the suckers from a tobacco plant," he added scornfully. "In those things, yes; and in any life that is good, and true, and natural." "Well, I have lived near enough to Nature to hate her with all my might," he answered, not without bitterness. "Why, there are times when I'd like to kick every ploughed field I see out into eternity. Tobacco-growing is one of the natural things, I suppose, but if you want to see any beauty in it you must watch it from a shady road. When you get in the midst of it you'll find it coarse and sticky, and given over generally to worms. I have spent my whole life working on it, and to this day I never look at a plant nor smell a pipe without a shiver of disgust. The things I want are over there," he finished, pointing with his whip-handle to the clear horizon. "I want the excitement that makes one's blood run like wine." "Battle, murder, and all that, I suppose?" she said, smiling. "War, and fame, and love," he corrected. Her face had grown grave, and in the thoughtful look she turned upon him it seemed to him that he saw a purpose slowly take form. So earnest was her gaze that at last his own fell before it, at which she murmured a confused apology, like one forcibly awakened from a dream. "I was wondering what that other life would have made of you," she said; "the life that I have known and wearied of--a life of petty shams, of sham love, of sham hate, of sham religion. It is all little, you know, and it takes a little soul to keep alive in it. I craved it once myself, and it took six years of artifice to teach me that I loved a plain truth better than a pretty lie." He had been looking at the strong white hand lying in her lap, and now, with a laugh, he held out his own bronzed and roughened one. "There is the difference," he said; "do you see it?"