Beth smiled, for the goading devil had just whispered to her, “You were a vestal virgin doubtless—­oh, severely chaste!"...  She said, “You believe then we have come up through ’a cycle of Cathay’?”

“If I had heard your name, just your name, over there in India,” he replied thoughtfully, “it would have had some deep meaning for me.”

“The ‘cycle of Cathay’ wasn’t enough to cure you?”

He turned quickly, but didn’t smile.  “I think there was always some distance between us, that we were never equal, a difference like that between Clarendon and the chestnut.  Only you were always above me, and it was the better, the right way.  Beth——­”

She looked up.

“Is there any reason why I shouldn’t tell you how great you are to me—­just that—­asking nothing?”

“We are both grown-ups,” she answered readily.  “You won’t mind if I find it rather hard to believe—­I mean, my greatness.  You like my riding and the portrait——­”

“I can judge your riding.  As for the picture, it is an inspiration, though I cannot judge that so well.  But it is not those——­”

“And what then, pray?”

“Beth Truba.”

“A tired old artist whom nobody knows—­really.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that,” he declared earnestly.  “There is nothing alive this moment, nothing in the great sun’s light, that has put on such a glory of maturity.  Why, you are concentrated sunlight—­to me!”

“That’s very pretty,” she said, and turned a glance into his eyes....  The same cool deeps were there, though his face held a singular happiness.  She wondered if it were because she had not forbade him to speak.  Did he think she was ready, and that her heart was free?

There was no one on the sloping hill-road, either to the right or left, and only the colts in the meadows.  A good free thing—­this elimination of human beings—­though at this height, they stood in the very eye of the country-side.  The chestnut mare was cropping the young grass by the edge of the highway, but there were matters for Clarendon to understand—­far distances and movements not for human eyes.  The colts racing up and down the hill-fence were beneath his notice.  The great arched neck was lifted for far gazing and listening, and that which came to his foreign senses, caused him to snort softly from time to time....

Beth rode without hat.  Her arms were bare to the elbows; her gray silk waist open at the throat.  She stretched out her arms, and the sunlight, cut by the high elm boughs, fell upon her like a robe, woven of shimmerings.  She seemed to want her full portion of vitality from the great upbuilding day.

“It’s strong medicine—­this high noon of June,” she said.  “One feels like unfolding as flowers do.”