Salsbury did not reply.  He sat, leaning back, with his fingers interlaced behind his head, and his shadowy eyes downcast, as in sad remembrance of some long-lost love.  So might a poet have looked, while steeped in mournfully rapturous daydreams of remembered passion and severance.  So might Tennyson’s hero have mused, while he sang: 

  “Oh, that ’twere possible,
    After long grief and pain,
  To find the arms of my true love
    Round me once again!”

But the poetic lips opened not to such numbers.  Salsbury gazed long and earnestly, and finally gave vent to his emotion, indicating, with the amber tip of his cigar-tube, the setter that slept in the sunshine at his feet.

“Shocking place, this, for dogs!”—­I regret to say he pronounced it “dawgs”—­“Why, Carlo is as fat—­as fat as—­as a—­”

His mind was unequal to a simile even, and he terminated the sentence in a murmur.

More silence; more smoke; more profound meditation.  Directly Charley Burnham looked around with some show of vitality.

“There comes the stage,” said he.

The driver’s bugle rang merrily among the drifted sand-hills that lay warm and glowing in the orange light of the setting sun.  The young men leaned forward over the piazza-rail and scrutinized the occupants of the vehicle as it appeared.

“Old gentleman and lady, aw, and two children,” said Ned Salsbury; “I hoped there would be some nice girls.”

This, in a voice of ineffable tenderness and poetry, but with that odd, tired little drawl, so epidemic in some of our universities.

“Look there, by Jove!” cried Charley, with a real interest at last; “now that’s what I call a regular thing!”

The “regular thing” was a low, four-wheeled pony-chaise of basket-work, drawn by two jolly little fat ponies, black and shiny as vulcanite, which jogged rapidly in, just far enough behind the stage to avoid its dust.

This vehicle was driven by a young lady of decided beauty, with a spice of Amazonian spirit.  She was rather slender and very straight, with a jaunty little hat and feather perched coquettishly above her dark brown hair, which was arranged in one heavy mass and confined in a silken net.  Her complexion was clear, without brilliancy; her eyes blue as the ocean horizon, and spanned by sharp, characteristic brows; her mouth small and decisive; and her whole cast of features indicative of quick talent and independence.

Upon the seat beside her sat another damsel, leaning indolently back in the corner of the carriage.  This one was a little fairer than the first, having one of those beautiful English complexions of mingled rose and snow, and a dash of gold-dust in her hair where the sun touched it.  Her eyes, however, were dark hazel and full of fire, shaded and intensified by their long, sweeping lashes.  Her mouth was a rosebud, and her chin and throat faultless in the delicious curve of their lines.  In a word, she was somewhat of the Venus-di-Milo type; her companion was more of a Diana.  Both were neatly habited in plain travelling-dresses and cloaks of black and white plaid, and both seemed utterly unconscious of the battery of eyes and eye-glasses that enfiladed them from the whole length of the piazza as they passed.