"Yes," she answered, "that is why the air is so warm and fragrant, and the sky so blue, and the scent of the pines so delicious. It is all different when one is awake. That is why I am making the most of every second, and am determined to enjoy it to the very utmost." "That is what I am doing," he said. "It is not a good plan, as a rule," she began, and then checked herself. "No," she said, "I won't say that. It is a worldly and Washingtonian sentiment. I will save it until next winter." "Don't save it at all," he said; "it is an unnatural sentiment. It isn't true, and you do not really believe it." "It is safer," she said. He lay still a moment, looking down the hillside through the trees at the broad sweep of the river bend and the purple hills beyond. "Bertha," he said, at last, "sometimes I hate the man who has taught you all this." She plucked at the red-tipped moss at her side for a second or so before she replied; she showed no surprise or hurry when she spoke. "Laurence Arbuthnot!" she said. "Sometimes I hate him, too; but it is only for a moment,--when he tells me the simple, deadly truth, and I know it is the truth, and wish I did not." She threw the little handful of moss down the hill as if she threw something away with it. "But this is not being happy," she said. "Let us be happy. I _will_ be happy. Janey is better, and all my anxiety is over, and it is such a lovely day, and I have put on my favorite gown to celebrate it in. Look at the color of the hills over there--listen to those doves in the pines. How warm and soft the wind is, and how the scent of my carnations fills the air! Ah, what a bright world it is, after all!" She broke into singing softly, and half under breath, a snatch of a gay little song. Tredennis had never heard her sing it before, and thought it wonderfully sweet. But she sang no more than a line or two, and then turned to him, with a smile in her eyes. "Now," she said, "it is your turn. Talk to me. Tell me about your life in the West; tell me all you did the first year, and begin--begin just where you left me the night you bade me good-by at the carriage-door." "I am afraid it would not be a very interesting story," he said. "It would interest me," she answered. "There are camp-fires in it, and scalps, and Indians, and probably war-paths." And her voice falling a little, "I want to discover why it was that you always seemed to be so much alone, and sat and thought in that dreary way by the fire in your quarters. It seems to me that you have been a great deal alone." "I have been a great deal alone," he said; "that is true."