“Just think, John, how long it is since you came.  It seems years.  Oh, you were a queer boy!  I just hated you.”

“I do suppose, Leila, I must have looked odd with that funny cap and the cane—­”

“And the way you looked when I told you about swinging on the gate.  I hadn’t done that for—­oh, two years.  What did you think of me?”

“I thought you were very rude, and then—­oh, Leila! when you came up out of the drift—­” He hesitated.

“Oh, go on; I don’t mind—­not now.”

“I thought you beautiful with all that splendid hair on the snow.”

“Oh, John!  How silly!” Whether or not she was unusually good to look at had hardly ever before occurred to her.  She flushed slightly, pleased and wondering, with a new seed of gentle vanity planted in her simple nature, a child on the threshold of the womanly inheritance of maidenhood.

Then he said gravely, “It is wonderful to me how we have changed.  I shall miss you.  To think you are the only girl I ever played with, and now when you come back at Christmas—­”

“I am not to come back then, John.  I am to stay with my uncles in Baltimore and not come home until next June.”

“You will be a young lady in long skirts and your hair tucked up.  It’s dreadful.”

“Can’t be helped, John.  You will look after Lucy, and write to me.”

“And you will write to me, Leila?”

“If I may.  Aunt says they are very strict.  But I shall write to Aunt Ann, of course.”

“That won’t be the same.”

“No.”

They walked on in silence for a little while, the girl gazing idly at the tall trees, the lad feeling strangely aware, freshly aware, as they moved, of the great blue eyes and of the sun-shafts falling on the abundant hair she swept back from time to time with a careless hand.  Presently she stood still, and sat down without a word on the moss-cushioned trunk of a great spruce, fallen perhaps a century ago.  She was passing through momentary moods of depression or of pleasure as she thought of change and travel, or nourishing little jealous desires that her serious-minded cousin should miss her.

The cousin turned back.  “You might have invited me to sit down, Miss Grey.”  He laughed, and then as he fell on the brown pine-needles at her feet and looked up, he saw that her usual quick response to his challenge of mirth was wanting.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

“Oh, about Aunt Ann and Uncle Jim, and—­and—­Lucy, and who will ride her—­”

“You can trust Uncle Jim about Lucy.”

“I suppose so,” said the girl rather dolefully and too near to the tears she had been sternly taught to suppress.

“Isn’t it queer,” he said, “how people think about the same things?  I was just going to speak of Aunt Ann and Uncle Jim.  Uncle Jim often talks to me and to Mr. Rivers about the election, but if I say a word or ask a question at table, Aunt Ann says, ‘we don’t talk politics.’”