The man beside her apparently found the contrast between her looks and the heartfelt sincerity of her question too much for him.  He burst into helpless laughter, though he was adroit enough to thrust forward as a pretext, “The picture of my own grime that I get from your accent is tremendous!” But it was evidently not at his own joke that he was laughing.

For an instant Sylvia hung poised very near to extreme annoyance.  Never since she had been grown up, had she appeared at such an absurd disadvantage.  But at once the mental picture of herself, making inaudible carping strictures on her companion’s sootiness and, all unconscious, lifting to observe it a critical countenance as swart as his own—­the incongruity smote her deliciously, irresistibly!  Sore heart or not, black depression notwithstanding, she needs must laugh, and having laughed, laugh again, laugh louder and longer, and finally, like a child, laugh for the sake of laughing, till out through this unexpected channel she discharged much of the stagnant bitterness around her heart.

Her companion laughed with her.  The still, sultry summer woods echoed with the sound.  “How human, how lusciously human!” he exclaimed.  “Neither of us thought that he might be the blackened one!”

“Oh, mine can’t be as bad as yours!” gasped out Sylvia, but when she rubbed a testing handkerchief on her cheek, she went off in fresh peals at the sight of the resultant black smears.

“Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, waste that handkerchief,” cautioned her companion.  “It’s the only towel between us.  Mine’s impossible!” He showed her the murky rag which was his own; and as they spoke, they reached the top of the road, heard the sound of water, and stood beside the brook.

He stepped across it, in one stride of his long legs, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, took a book out of his pocket, laid it on a stone, and knelt down.  “I choose this for my wash-basin,” he said, indicating a limpid pool paved with clean gray pebbles.

Sylvia answered in the same note of play, “This’ll be mine.”  It lay at the foot of a tiny waterfall, plashing with a tinkling note into transparent shallows.  She cast an idle glance on the book he had laid down and read its title, “A History of the Institution of Property,” and reflected that she had been right in thinking it had a familiar-looking cover.  She had dusted books with that sort of cover all her life.

Molly’s cousin produced from his overalls a small piece of yellow kitchen-soap, which he broke into scrupulously exact halves and presented with a grave flourish to Sylvia.  “Now, go to it,” he exhorted her; “I bet I get a better wash than you.”