They had much gentle desultory conversation. She took him about the place, showed him the old orchard where her great-grandmother's pupils had played--one end was now made into a tennis-court, and the stable with its traces of the old barn where the Rev. Roper Ellwell had kept his horse and cow. Then there were little pigs and chickens, the various gardens that were all dear to her, where she patted and caressed the plants as if they had been alive. She took him to her own den, a little room where the grandfatherly sermons had once been written, and where hung a copy of that oil portrait which Thornton had seen in the Camberton Hall. "Am I not like him?" she asked suddenly, placing herself in the same light as the portrait. "Yes," Thornton answered, "with a difference." "What is it?" she pressed him anxiously. "I don't know, the something that has come in with the three generations," he answered, slowly. "Tell me honestly," she persisted, with all the egotism of youth aroused over a personal verdict. "Shall I?" he said, seriously. She grew grave, but nodded. Thornton watched the color leave and a trace of helplessness cross her face. "The old fellow," he kept looking from the portrait to the woman before him, "in spite of his stiff board costume and the manner he's painted in, was a great lump of fire. It burned hard in him, burned away flesh and common passions; he must have been a restless, fervent man. You are calmer," he ended, stupidly. "Yes, you mean that his fire has burnt out; that I am weak as water, when he was strong." "No, not that, exactly," Thornton protested. "Yes, you did," she reiterated, sadly. "And it is so, too. I am generally so tired. There are only hours like these, when something flows in and I forget things and am happy. But it fades away, it fades away." They stood silent before the portrait. Suddenly she remembered herself. "Luncheon must be ready." Ruby came in for luncheon and made amusing talk. She had been into the village and was full of the farmers. "I should think they would go crazy," she ended, scornfully. "What have they got to live for? I don't wonder that the girls go into the mills and do anything rather than sit about this little hole." Later they set out for the fields as the afternoon sun was quietly going down behind the fringe of pines that skirted the horizon. The atmosphere of the day had changed and become like the still calm of perfected life. The little aspirations of the morning, the fascinations of nature, had given place to a content full of warmth. Miss Ellwell took a winding wood-road that led first across the meadow, then over the pine-needles to a little pond. As they sauntered along Thornton watched his companion draw in the saturated air of the summer afternoon, as if consciously living thereon. She seemed to him detached, like a plant that drew its best power away from man, in fields and woods, a kind of parasite. "You love this?" he said, idly.