They were no more than out of earshot of the group left on the porch, than Sylvia, as so often happened in her growing acquaintanceship with Page, found herself obliged entirely to reconstruct an impression of him.  It was with anything but a rich man’s arrogant certainty of her interest that he said, very simply as he said everything:  “I appreciate very much, Miss Marshall, your being willing to come along and see all this.  It’s a part of your general kindness to everybody.  I hope it won’t bore you to extremity.  I’m so heart and soul in it myself, I shan’t know when to stop talking about it.  In fact I shan’t want to stop, even if I know I should.  I’ve never said much about it to any one before, and I very much want your opinion on it.”

Sylvia felt a decent pinch of shame, and her eyes were not brilliant with sardonic irony but rather dimmed with self-distrust as she answered with a wholesome effort for honesty:  “I really don’t know a single thing about forestry, Mr. Page.  You’ll have to start in at the very beginning, and explain everything.  I hope I’ve sense enough to take an intelligent interest.”  Very different, this, from the meretricious sparkle of her, “Oh yes, do show me, Mr. Page.”  She felt that to be rather cheap, as she remembered it.  She wondered if he had seen its significance, had seen through her.  From a three weeks’ intensive acquaintance with him, she rather thought he had.  His eyes were clear, formidably so.  He put her on her mettle.

Arnold had lighted his cigarette by this time, offered one to Page with his incurable incapacity to remember that not every sane man smokes, and on being refused, put his hands deep in his pockets.  The three tall young people were making short work of the stretch of sunny, windy, upland pasture, and were already almost in the edge of the woods which covered the slope of the mountain above them up to the very crest, jewel-green against the great, piled, cumulus clouds.

“Well, I will begin at the beginning, then,” said Page.  “I’ll begin back in 1762, when this valley was settled and my ever-so-many-greats-grandfather took possession of a big slice of this side of Hemlock Mountain, with the sole idea that trees were men’s enemies.  The American colonists thought of forests, you know, as places for Indians to lurk, spots that couldn’t be used for corn, growths to be exterminated as fast as possible.”

They entered the woods now, walking at a good pace up the steeply rising, grass-grown wood-road.  Sylvia quite consciously summoned all her powers of attention and concentration for the hour before her, determined to make a good impression to counteract whatever too great insight her host might have shown in the matter of her first interest.  She bent her fine brows with the attention she had so often summoned to face a difficult final examination, to read at the correct tempo a complicated piece of music, to grasp the essentials of a new subject.  Her