“Ah, David!  David!” cried a gay young voice behind him.  “Dreaming again—­with your eyes wide open.  And seeing visions, too, no doubt.”

He turned with a guilty start and looked up at Ruth.  She was standing near by but higher on the river bank, and her slender white form was half concealed by the drooping foliage of a young willow tree.  There was something about Ruth herself that always made him think of a young willow with every graceful wand in bloom.  And now—­as nearly always—­there was a flutter of soft whiteness about her, for the day was as warm as mid-summer.  He could not have told what it was that she wore, but her fluttering white garments might have been woven of the mists training over the hills, so ethereal they looked, seen through the golden green of the delicate willow leaves that were still gilded by the afterglow which had vanished from the shadowed river.  Her smiling face could not have been more radiant had the sunlight shone full upon it.  The dusk of evening seemed always lingering under the long curling lashes that made her blue eyes so dark, and her hair was as black at midday as at midnight.  So that now—­when she shook her head at the boy—­a wonderful long, thick, silky lock escaped its fastenings, and the wind caught it and spun it like silk into the finest blue-black floss.

“Yes, sir, you’ve been dreaming again!  You needn’t pretend you were thinking—­you don’t know how to think.  Thinking is not romantic enough.  I have been here watching you for a long time, and I know just how romantic the dreams are that you have been dreaming.  I could tell by the way you turned,—­this way and that,—­looking up and down the river.  It always bewitches you when the sun goes and the shadows come.  I knew I should find you here, just like this; and I came on purpose to wake and scold you.”

She pretended to draw her pretty brow into a frown, but she could not help smiling.

“Seriously, dear, you must stop dreaming.  It is a dreadful thing to be a dreamer in a new country.  State makers should all be wide-awake workers.  You are out of place here; as Uncle Philip Alston says—­”

“Then why did he put me here?” the boy burst out bitterly.

“David!” she cried in wounded reproach, “how can you?  It hurts me to hear you say things like that.  I can’t bear to hear any one say anything against him—­I love him so.  And from you—­who owe him almost as much as I do—­”

The tears were very near.  But she was a little angry, too, and her blue eyes flashed.

“No; no one owes him so much—­as myself.  He couldn’t have been so good—­no one ever could be so good to any one else as he has always been to me.  Still”—­softening suddenly, for she was fond of the boy, and something in his sensitive face went to her tender heart—­“think, David, dear, we owe him everything we have,—­our names, our home, our clothes, our education, our very lives.  We must never for a moment forget that