Miss Roberta’s father was a man whose mind and time were entirely given up to railroads; and although he nominally lived in New York, he was, for the greater part of the year, engaged in endeavors to forward his interests somewhere west of the Mississippi.  Two or three months of the winter were generally spent in his city home.  At these times he had his daughter with him, but the rest of the year she lived with her uncle, whose household she directed with much good will and judgment.  The old gentleman did not keep her all the summer at Midbranch.  He knew what was necessary for a young lady who had been educated in Germany and Switzerland, and who had afterwards made a very favorable impression in Paris and London; and so, during the hot weather, he took her with him to one of the fashionable Southern resorts, where they always stayed exactly six weeks.

The gentleman who was sitting on the other side of the platform, with his face turned towards her, had known Miss Roberta for a year or more, having met her at the North, and also in the Virginia mountains; and being now on a visit to the Green Sulphur Springs, about four miles from Midbranch, he rode over to see her nearly every day.  There was nothing surprising in this, because the Green Sulphur, once a much frequented resort, had seen great changes, and now, although the end of the regular season had not arrived, it had Mr Lawrence Croft for its only guest.  There was a spacious hotel there; there was a village of cottages of varying sizes; there were buildings for servants and managers; there was a ten-pin alley and a quiet ground; there were arbors and swings; and a square hole in a stone slab, through which a little pool of greenish water could be seen, with a tin cup, somewhat rusty, lying by it.  But all was quiet and deserted, except one cottage, in which the man lived who had charge of the place, and where Mr Croft boarded.  It was very pleasant for him to ride over to Midbranch and take a walk with Miss Roberta; and this was what they had been doing to-day.

Horseback rides had been suggested, but Mr Brandon objected to these.  He knew Mr Croft to be a young man of good family and very comfortable fortune, and he liked him very much when he had him there to dinner, but he did not wish his niece to go galloping around the country with him.  To quiet walks in the woods, and through the meadows, he could, of course, have no objection.  A good many of Mr Brandon’s principles, like certain of his books, were kept upon a top shelf, but Miss Roberta always liked to humor the few which the old gentleman was wont to have within easy reach.

This afternoon they had rambled through the woods, where the hard, smooth road wound picturesquely through the places in which it had been easiest to make a road, and where the great trunks of the trees were partly covered by clinging vines, which Miss Roberta knew to be either Virginia creeper or poison oak, although she did not remember which of these had clusters of five leaves, and which of three.