“I will not trouble you,” she answered, and presently turned aside to pull them for herself.

He looked at the graceful, bending figure and lifted his brows; then, quickening his pace until he was up with the coach, he spoke to the negro upon the box.  “Tyre, drive on to that big pine, and wait there for your mistress and me.  Sidon,”—­to the footman,—­“get down and take my horse.  If your master wakes, tell him that Mistress Evelyn tired of the coach, and that I am picking her a nosegay.”

Tyre and Sidon, Haward’s steed, the four black coach horses, the vermilion-and-cream coach, and the slumbering Colonel, all made a progress of an hundred yards to the pine-tree, where the cortege came to a halt.  Mistress Evelyn looked up from the flower-gathering to find the road bare before her, and Haward, sitting upon a log, watching her with something between a smile and a frown.

“You think that I, also, weigh true love by the weight of the purse,” he said.  “I do not care overmuch for your gold, Evelyn.”

She did not answer at once, but stood with her head slightly bent, fingering the waxen flowers with a delicate, lingering touch.  Now that there was no longer the noise of the wheels and the horses’ hoofs, the forest stillness, which is composed of sound, made itself felt.  The call of birds, the whir of insects, the murmur of the wind in the treetops, low, grave, incessant, and eternal as the sound of the sea, joined themselves to the slow waves of fragrance, the stretch of road whereon nothing moved, the sunlight lying on the earth, and made a spacious quiet.

“I think that there is nothing for which you care overmuch,” she said at last.  “Not for gold or the lack of it, not for friends or for enemies, not even for yourself.”

“I have known you for many years,” he answered.  “I have watched you grow from a child into a gracious and beautiful woman.  Do you not think that I care for you, Evelyn?”

Near where he sat so many violets were blooming that they made a purple carpet for the ground.  Going over to them, she knelt and began to pluck them.  “If any danger threatened me,” she began, in her clear, low voice, “I believe that you would step between me and it, though at the peril of your life.  I believe that you take some pleasure in what you are pleased to style my beauty, some pride in a mind that you have largely formed.  If I died early, it would grieve you for a little while.  I call you my friend.”

“I would be called your lover,” he said.

She laid her fan upon the ground, heaped it with violets, and turned again to her reaping.  “How might that be,” she asked, “when you do not love me?  I knew that you would marry me.  What do the French call it,—­mariage de convenance?”

Her voice was even, and her head was bent so that he could not see her face.  In the pause that followed her words treetop whispered to treetop, but the sunshine lay very still and bright upon the road and upon the flowers by the wayside.