Was it as a reward for her faith that Tom began to talk to her?  He had paced on by her side, serious, but not sad.  True, he had suspected her; he suspected her still.  But that scene with the dying child had been no sham.  There, at least, there was nothing to suspect, nothing to sneer at.  The calm purity, self-sacrifice, hope, which was contained in it, had softened his world-hardened spirit, and woke up in him feelings which were always pleasant, feelings which the sight of his father, or the writing to his father, could only awaken.  Quaintly enough, the thought of Grace and of his father seemed intertwined, inextricable.  If the old man had but such a nurse as she!  And for a moment he felt a glow of tenderness toward her, because he thought she would be tender to his father.  She had stolen his money, certainly; or if not, she knew where it was, and would not tell him.  Well, what matter just then?  He did not want the money at that minute.  How much pleasanter and wiser to take things as they came, and enjoy himself while he could; and fancy that she was always what he had seen her that day.  After all, it was much more pleasant to trust people than to suspect them:  “Handsome is who handsome does!  And besides, she did me the kindness of saving my life; so it would but be civil to talk to her a little.”

He began to talk to her about the lovely scene around; and found, to his surprise, that she saw as much of it as he, and saw a great deal more in it than he.  Her answers were short, modest, faltering; but each one of them suggestive; and Tom soon found that he had met with a mind which contained all the elements of poetry, and needed only education to develop them.

“What a blue stocking, pre-Raphaelite seventh-heavenarian she would have been, if she had had the misfortune to be born in that station of life!” But where a clever man is talking to a beautiful woman, talk he will, and must, for the mere sake of showing off, though she be but a village schoolmistress; and Tom soon found himself, with a secret sneer at his own vanity, displaying before her all the much finer things that he had seen in his travels; and as he talked, she answered, with quiet expressions of wonder, sympathy, regret at her own narrow sphere of experience, till, as if the truth was not enough, he found himself running to the very edge of exaggeration, and a little over it, in the enjoyment of calling out her passion for the marvellous, especially when called out in honour of himself.

And she, simple creature, drank it all in as sparkling wine, and only dreaded lest the stream should cease.  Adventures with noble savages in palm-fringed coral-islands, with greedy robbers amid the fragrant hills of Greece, with fierce Indians beneath the snow-peaks of the Far West, with coward Mexicans among tunals of cactus and agave, beneath the burning tropic sun—­What a man he was!  Where had he not been? and what had he not seen?  And how he had been preserved—­for