"That's the fear which haunts me," she smiled, as we crossed my brook and turned up the hill toward the first of the big estates. In front of this estate we paused and peeped through the hedge. The family had evidently arrived, for the unmistakable sounds of a pianola were issuing from the house. The great formal garden, still gay with Darwin tulips and beginning to show banks of iris flowers against lilac shrubbery, looked extremely expensive. The residence itself, of brown stucco, closely resembled a sublimated $100,000 ice-house. An expensive motor stood before the door. "How rich and ugly it is," said Miss Goodwin, turning away. "Let's not look at houses. Let's find some woods to walk in." We looked about us toward the high hills which ring the Bentford valley, and struck off toward what seemed the nearest. The side road we were on soon brought us to the main highway up the valley to the next town, and a motor whizzed past us, leaving a cloud of dust, then a second, and a third. We got off the highway as speedily as possible, crossing a farm pasture and entering the timber on the first slope of the big hill. Here a wood road led up, and we loitered along it, finding late violets and great clumps of red trilliums here and there. The girl sprang upon the first violets with a little cry of joy, picking them eagerly and pressing them to her nose. "Smell!" she laughed, holding them up to mine. She soon had her hands full, and was forced to pass by the next bed--as I told her, with the regret of a child who has eaten all the cake he can at a church supper. "No child ever ate all the cake he could," she laughed. "Oh, please dig up some trilliums and plant them in your garden, or rather in your woods!" "How are we going to get them home?" said I. "We'll have to dig up some of the earth, too, with the roots." "I know," she answered. "Even if I am a highbrow, I've not quite forgotten my childhood lessons in manual work--which I always hated till now. I'll weave a basket." Looking about, I saw a wild grape vine, and I pulled it down from the tree to which it was clinging. "I feel like a suffragette," said I, "destroying the clinging vine." "Cut it into two-foot lengths," she retorted, "and don't make poor puns." She sat on the brown needles at the foot of a pine, and began twisting the pieces of vine into a rough basket. I sat beside her and watched her work. Out beyond us was a sun-soaked clearing, a tiny swamp on the hillside, and the sunlight dappled in across her skirt. As she worked, a wood thrush called far off, his last long-drawn note ringing like a sweet, wistful fairy horn. The white fingers paused in their weaving, and our eyes met. She did not speak, but looked smiling into my face as the call was repeated, while her throat fluttered. Then, without speaking, she turned back to her work. I, too, was silent. What need was there of words? "Was that a hermit, too?" she asked presently. "It sounded different."