“You mean that boarding house of yours in town?”

“Yes.  Also, when mother and I kept house with an oil stove and two rooms the odour of medicine and my own cooking left me rather indifferent to the pleasures of Lucullus.”

“You poor child!”

“Not at all to be pitied—­as long as I had mother,” she said, with a quiet gravity that silenced him.

Up, up, and still up they climbed, the fat horse walking leisurely, nipping at blackberry leaves here, snatching at tender maple twigs there.  The winged mountain beauties—­Diana’s butterflies—­bearing on their velvety, blue-black pinions the silver bow of the goddess, flitted ahead of the horse—­celestial pilots to the tree-clad heights beyond.

Save for the noise of the horse’s feet and the crunch of narrow, iron-tired wheels, the stillness was absolute under the azure splendour of the heavens.

“I am not yet quite at my ease—­quite accustomed to it,” she said.

“To what, Valerie?”

“To the stillness; to the remote horizons....  At night the vastness of things, the height of the stars, fascinate me to the edge of uneasiness.  And sometimes I go and sit in my room for a while—­to reassure myself....  You see I am used to an enclosure—­the walls of a room—­the walled-in streets of New York....  It’s like suddenly stepping out of a cellar to the edge of eternal space, and looking down into nothing.”

“Is that the way these rolling hillocks of Delaware County impress you?” he asked, laughing.

“Yes, Kelly.  If I ever found myself in the Alps I believe the happiness would so utterly over-awe me that I’d remain in my hotel under the bed.  What are you laughing at? Voluptates commendat rarior usus.”

“Sit tua cura sequi, me duce tutus eris!” he laughed, mischievously testing her limit of Latin.

“Plus e medico quam e morbo periculi!” she answered, saucily.

“You cunning little thing!” he exclaimed:  “vix a te videor posse tenere manus!”

“Di melius, quam nos moneamus talia quenquam!” she said, demurely; “Louis, we are becoming silly!  Besides, I probably know more Latin than you do—­as it was my mother’s favourite relaxation to teach me to speak it.  And I imagine that your limit was your last year at Harvard.”

“Upon my word!” he exclaimed; “I never was so snubbed and patronised in all my life!”

“Beware, then!” she retorted, with an enchanting sideway glance:  “noli me tangere!” At the same instant he was aware of her arm in light, friendly contact against his, and heard her musing aloud in deep contentment: 

“Such perfect satisfaction to have you again, Louis.  The world is a gray void without the gods.”

And so, leisurely, they breasted the ascent and came out across the height-of-land.  Here and there a silvery ghost of the shorn forest stood, now almost mercifully hidden in the green foliage of hard wood—­worthlessly young as yet but beautiful.