He half suspected for a little while after this that she might be contemplating some radical step--what, he did not care to say to himself, but he was intensely interested in her problem. This peculiar freedom of thought astonished him--broadened his horizon. He wondered what his sister Myrtle would think of a girl discussing marriage in this way--the to be or not to be of it--what Sylvia? He wondered if many girls did that. Most of the women he had known seemed to think more logically along these lines than he did. He remembered asking Ruby once whether she didn't think illicit love was wrong and hearing her reply, "No. Some people thought it was wrong, but that didn't make it so to her." Here was another girl with another theory. They talked more of love, and he wondered why she wanted him to come up to Florizel in the summer. She could not be thinking--no, she was too conservative. He began to suspect, though, that she would not marry him--would not marry anyone at present. She merely wanted to be loved for awhile, no doubt. May came and with it the end of Christina's concert work and voice study so far as New York was concerned. She had been in and out of the city all the winter--to Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Chicago, St. Paul and now after a winter's hard work retired to Hagerstown with her mother for a few weeks prior to leaving for Florizel. "You ought to come down here," she wrote to Eugene early in June. "There is a sickle moon that shines in my garden and the roses are in bloom. Oh, the odors are so sweet, and the dew! Some of our windows open out level with the grass and I sing! I sing!! I sing!!!" He had a notion to run down but restrained himself, for she told him that they were leaving in two weeks for the mountains. He had a set of drawings to complete for a magazine for which they were in a hurry. So he decided to wait till that was done. In late June he went up to the Blue Ridge, in Southern Pennsylvania, where Florizel was situated. He thought at first he would be invited to stay at the Channing bungalow, but Christina warned him that it would be safer and better for him to stay at one of the adjoining hotels. There were several on the slope of adjacent hills at prices ranging from five to ten dollars a day. Though this was high for Eugene he decided to go. He wanted to be with this marvellous creature--to see just what she did mean by wishing they were in the mountains together. He had saved some eight hundred dollars, which was in a savings bank and he withdrew three hundred for his little outing. He took Christina a very handsomely bound copy of Villon, of whom she was fond, and several volumes of new verse. Most of these, chosen according to his most recent mood, were sad in their poetic texture; they all preached the nothingness of life, its sadness, albeit the perfection of its beauty.