Twenty minutes afterward he drove up to the door with the best that the village liveryman had to give for the highest price his customer could offer--a tall black horse of fair proportions, and a hurriedly washed buggy of the type in vogue in country districts. But as Georgiana went down the path she was conscious that the figure which stood hat and reins in hand awaiting her would lend dignity to any vehicle, short of a wheelbarrow, in which he might be seen to ride. Then presently the pair were driving along country lanes in the very midst of all the burgeoning beauty of the season, and Georgiana was like a captive bird let loose. Her companion as well responded to the call of Nature at her loveliest, and the tireless worker of the study seemed changed at a word to a bright-eyed idler of the most carefree sort. The two gave themselves up without restraint to the enjoyment of the hour. "I wonder how long it is," said Mr. Jefferson, letting the reins lie loose at a leafy curve of the road while the black horse willingly walked, "since I have had a drive like this. Not for ten years at least." "You've lived always in a great city?" "Since boyhood--in the heart of it." "And have driven motors, not horses, for those ten years." "Yes, like everybody else. But I spent all my summers as a boy on my grandfather's farm, and there I drove horses and rode them and did acrobatic feats on their bare backs. I was a wild Indian, a cowboy, and a captain of cavalry by turns. Those were happy days, and on a day like this they don't seem long ago." "They can't be so dreadfully long ago," she dared, with a glance at the interesting profile beside her. "Can't they? Don't I look pretty aged compared with your youth?" "I'm not so remarkably young," she retorted. "Aren't you? You are about ten years younger than I. That's a big leap and must make me seem a grandfather indeed." "But you don't know how old I am." "I could come pretty close to it," said he with a quick look. "How could you know?" "When you see a spray of apple blossoms like those"--he pointed toward a mass of pink and white at the stage of perfection beyond an old rail fence--"can't you tell at a glance whether they've been out a day or a week?" "I should say that if things had happened to them to make them feel as if they'd been out a week when they had been out only two days----" "A heavy rain, for instance? In that case we should be deceived--perhaps. But in the case of a human being those heavy rains sometimes only mature without fading---- Hello,----what's this?" A small and very ragged boy had emerged suddenly from a meadow gateway, his face convulsed with pain and fright. He nursed one hand in the other and the colour had deserted his round cheek, leaving it pallid under its freckles. The only house nearby was an abandoned one and there were no others for some distance in either direction.