Buttercups scattered garish gold around them, and beyond, among the trees, the wild geranium rose on its slender stalk, making a phantom bit of colour against the background of dead leaves. Between the mossy stumps budded mandrakes were huddled closely together, afraid to bloom till others had led the way. Beatrice looked around her and drew a long breath, then gently stroked a satin bud upon a bare stalk of hickory. "Why don't you pick something?" asked Robert, with a laugh. "That's what we came for, isn't it?" "No, I can't pick things. I feel as if I were hurting them. Suppose you lived here in this lovely place and a giant came along and broke you off at the waist to take your head home with him--how do you suppose you'd feel?" "I don't think I'd feel anything after the break. Besides, that's not a fair hypothesis. There is no real analogy." "Hy-poth-e-sis," repeated Beatrice, looking at him, mischievously; "did I pronounce it right?" "Of course--why?" "Because," she answered, with her eyes dancing, "it's a nice word and I'd like to learn it. I want to say it to Doctor Norton. Some of his words are as long at that, but they're not nearly so complicated, and I yearn to excel in his own specialty." The girl's mock reverence for his learning irritated him unspeakably, and he closed his lips in a thin, tight line. "Cousin Rob," she said, putting her hand on his arm, and with bewildering kindness in her tone, "can't you take me just as I am?" The temptation to take her, just as she was, into his arms, made him draw back a step or two. "I always make a point of that," he said, clearing his throat. Then a vista opened before them, which might have been a field of Paradise. Across the plain, where the dead goldenrod of Autumn still lingered, there were white blossoms on invisible branches, set against the turquoise sky, as still as stars of frost. It was as though a cloud of white butterflies had paused for an instant, with every dusty wing longing for flight. Great white triliums bloomed in clusters farther on, with here and there a red one, lonely as a lost child. Far to the right was a little hollow filled with wild phlox, shading from white to deepest lavender, and breathing the haunting fragrance which no one ever forgets. "Let's go to the lake," she said. Tall bluffs rose on either side where they turned eastward, with triliums and dog-tooth violets within easy reach, and a robin's cheery chirp was answered by another far away. Slanting sunbeams came like arrows of light into the shadow of the woods, and at the shore line was an expanse of sand which shone like silver under the white light of noon. "Why do you stand there?" asked Beatrice. "Why don't you sit down?" "I was just looking at something." "What?" "Come here--perhaps you can see." She strained her eyes in the direction he indicated, but unsuccessfully. "I don't see anything," she said; "what is it like?"