"I haven't forgotten, Note. But it can't be the same again, as man and woman, with what you are, and what I am." "Better! O Vesty!"--he stood quite on a level with her now; she was glad of that. She was a tall girl, taller than he when they parted. "O Vesty!" he drank in her beauty with an awe that uplifted her in his frank, bright gaze--"God was happy when He made you!" But the girl's eyes only searched his with a Basin gravity, for faith. A fatal step, searching in Notely's eyes! A beautiful pallor crept over her face, flushing into joy. She ran her hand through his rough, light hair in the old way. "It has not changed you, being at the schools so long, as I thought it would," she said wistfully, stroking his hair with mature gentleness, though he was older than she. "Why, Note; you look just as brown, and hearty, and masterful as ever!" "Oh, but it wasn't book-schools I went to, you know. It was rowing and foot-ball and taking six bars on the running leap, and swinging from the feet with the head downward, and all that. I can do it all." He looked away from her with mischief in his eyes, and hummed a line through his fine Greek nose, as Captain Pharo might. "I don't doubt it, but you were high in the college too--for Lunette saw it in a paper: so high it was spoken of!" "I just asked them to do that, Vesty. People can't refuse me, you know. I get whatever I ask for." He turned to her with a sort of childish pathos on his strong, handsome face. She bit her lip for joy and pride in him, even his strange, gay ways. "Come, Vesta!" he said, with an air of natural and graceful proprietorship; "a stolen meeting is nonsense between you and me. I shall see you home." II "SETTIN' ON THE LOG" His face invited me, the skin drawn over it rather tightly, resembling a death's-head, yet beaming with immortal joy. He was sitting on a log; his little granddaughter, on the other side of him, was as cheerfully diverted in falling off of it. He was picking his teeth with some mysterious talisman of a bone, selected from the forepaw of a deer, and gazing at the heavens as at a fond familiar brother. "Won't you set down a spa-ll," he said, and the way he said spell suggested pleasing epochs of rest. "Leezur's my name; and neow I'll tell ye how ye can all'as remember it; it's jest like all them great discoveries, it's dreadful easy when it's once been thought on. Leezur--leezure--see? Leezure means takin' things moderate, ye know, kind o' settin' areound in the shank o' the evenin'--Leezur--lee-zure--see!" Oh, how he beamed! The systems of Newton and Copernicus seemed dwarfed in comparison. I sat down on the log; the little girl, gazing at me in astonishment, fell off. "What's the marter, Dilly?" said her grandfather, in the same slow, mellow, jubilant tone with which he had propounded his discovery, and not withdrawing his fond smile from the heavens; "'s the log tew reoundin' for ye to set stiddy on?"