"'I hear the hoofs upon the hill; I hear them fainter, fainter still,'" she sang in her clear voice. "The idea of that old Virginia song coming to me here!" "This talk about reclaiming and reforming is all bosh," remarked Ash, leaning back against a high fragment of rock, with his hands in his pockets. "I am what I am because I choose to be, that's all. The usual successes of American life, what are they? I no longer care a rap about them, because I've had them, or at least have seen them within my reach. I came up from nothing; I got an education--no matter now how I got it; I studied law. In ten years I had won such a position in my profession (my branch of it--I was never an office lawyer) that everything lay open before me. It was only a question of a certain number of years. Not only was this generally prophesied, but I knew it myself. But by that time I had found out the unutterable stupidity of people and their pursuits; I couldn't help despising them. I had made enough to make my mother comfortable, and there came over me a horror of a plodding life. I said to myself, 'What is the use of it?' Of pleasure there was no question. But I could go back to that plodding life to-morrow if I chose. Don't you believe it, Pauline?" "Yes." "Yet you don't say--try?" "Try, by all means." "At a safe distance from you!" "Yes, at a safe distance from me," Pauline answered. "I should do you no good; I am not enough in earnest. I am never in earnest long about anything. I am changeable, too--you have no idea how changeable. There has been no opportunity to show you." "Is that a threat? You know that I am deeply in love with you." He did not move as he said this, but his eyes were fixed passionately upon her face. "I neither know it nor believe it; it is with you simply as it is with me--there is no one else here." She stood there watching the wavelets break at her feet. Nothing in her countenance corresponded in the least with the description she had just given of herself. "How you say that! What am I to think of you? You have a face to worship: does it lie?" said Ash. "Oh, my face!" She turned, and began to cross the field towards the farm. "It shouldn't have that expression, then," he said, joining her, and walking by her side. "I don't believe you know what it is yourself, Pauline--that expression. It seems to say as you talk, coming straight from those divine lips, those sweet eyes: 'I could love you. Be good and I will.' Why, you have almost made _me_ determine to be 'good' again, almost made _me_ begin to dream of going back to that plodding life that I loathe. And you don't know what I am." Mrs. Graham did not answer; she did not look up, though she knew that his head was bent beseechingly towards her.