Constance flushed slightly with embarrassment. Her random remark seemed almost to amount to a premeditated invitation to share his resources. Emil's gaze had followed hers in her allusion to the wild flowers. "I'll tell you what," he exclaimed, impulsively, "since we have three hours to wait, why shouldn't we escape from this culvert and see what there is to be seen from the top of the bank? I shall be able to show you Benham," he added, noticing, perhaps, that she looked doubtful, "for we are only nine or ten miles away." This was tempting. Besides it would surely be ridiculous to remain where she was rather than explore the country merely because he was a casual acquaintance and had some chocolate in his travelling bag. The circumstances were harmless and unavoidable, unless she wished to write herself down a prude. The result was the logic of common-sense prevailed, and Constance gave her consent to the proposal. So they climbed the bank presently, pausing on the way to gather some posies, with which the party of the second part proceeded to adorn her hat, after they had established themselves on an eligible fallen tree commanding a pleasing view. The fallen tree was at the edge of a copse of pine wood some two hundred yards from the bank. Thus they were sheltered from the sun. Out of the copse, almost at their feet, ran a bubbling brook, which added a touch of romance to the landscape rolling away in undulating and occasionally wooded farming land, as far as the eye could reach, until it terminated in a stretch of steeples and towers surmounted by a murky cloud. There was Benham. Although they were too distant to discern more than a confused panorama, Emil essayed a few topographical details. He explained that twenty-five years earlier Benham had comprised merely a cluster of frame houses in the valley of the peaceful river Nye, which still served as an aid to description. Primarily a village on the south side of the stream, it had first developed in a southerly direction, spreading like a bursting seed also laterally to east and west. Its original main street, once bordered by old-fashioned frame houses with grass-plots and shade trees, had evolved into Central Avenue, at first the desirable street for residences, but now, and considerably prior to his advent, the leading retail shopping artery, alive with dry-goods shops, into which the women swarmed like flies. To the west of Central Avenue lay the tide of social fashion culminating two miles distant in the River Drive, a wide avenue of stately private houses, situated where the Nye made a broad bend to the north, and the new district beyond the river, where the mansion of Carleton Howard, the railroad magnate, stood a pioneer among Elysian fields of real estate enterprise, sanctified by immaculate road surfaces and liberal electric light.