“No.  I have learned better.  It is not consistent.  You see, you mow alfalfa and you pick plums.”

This return to drollery, in keeping with the prescribed order of their relations, made her look up in candid amusement over the barrier which for a moment he had been endangering.

“Honestly, Jack, you do improve,” she said, with mock encouragement.  “You seem to have mastered a number of the simple truths of age-old agricultural experience.”

“But will you?  Will you ride to the pass?”

He had the question launched fairly into her eyes.  She could not escape it.  He saw one bright flash, whether of real anger or simply vexation at his reversion to the theme he could not tell, and her lashes dropped; she ran the leaf edges of the austere Marcus back and forth in her fingers, thip-thip-thip.  That was the only sound for some seconds, very long seconds.

“As I’ve already tried to make clear to you, it’s such a businesslike thing to ride to the pass unless you have the inspiration,” she remarked thoughtfully to Marcus.  “Perhaps I shall get the inspiration on the way back to the house;” which was a signal that she was going.  “And, by the way, Jack, to return to the object of my coming, if you have ideas of your own about flowers incorporate them; that is the way to develop your floricultural talent.”

She turned away, but he followed.  He was at her side and proceeding with her, his head bent toward her, boyishly, eagerly.

“You see, I have never been out to the pass,” he remarked urgently.

“What!  You—­” she started in surprise and checked herself.

“Didn’t I come by train?” he asked reprovingly.

“No!” she answered.  Her eyes were level with the road, her voice was a little unnatural.  “No!  You came over the pass, Jack.”

It was the first time in the months of his citizenship of Little Rivers that she had ever hinted anything but belief in the fiction that they had first met when he asked her to show him a parcel of land.  She seemed to be calling a truth out of the past and grappling with it, while her lips tightened and she drew in her chin.

“Then I did come over the pass,” he agreed; and after a pause added:  “But there was no Pete Leddy.”

“Yes, oh, yes—­there was a Pete Leddy!”

“But he will not be there this time!”

And now his voice, in a transport that seemed to touch the cloud heights, was neither like the voice of the easy traveller on the pass, nor the voice of his sharp call to Leddy to disarm, nor the voice of the storyteller.  It had a new note, a note startling to her.

“We shall be on the pass without Leddy and smiling over Leddy and thanking him for his unwitting service in making me stop in Little Rivers,” he concluded.

“Yes, he did that,” she admitted stoically, as if it were some oppressive fact for which she could offer no thanks.