play of her white fingers over the paper?  He had uttered frank flatteries to peeresses without rebuke.  But he held his hand before this school-girl, with the open dark-brown eyes and a club of yellow hair at the back of her neck.  He could not help feeling that, if he talked to her with any forcing of the personal accent, she would stop laughing and the clear eyes would be troubled.  He desired anything rather than that, and so the conversation went rattling on as free from personalities as the talk of two light-hearted and clever schoolboys.

At one moment he was describing a bill of fare in a Colorado hotel.

“With nice bread, though, one can always get on,” she said.

“True,” Farnham answered; “but this bread was of a ghostly pallor and flatness, as if it had been baked by moonlight on a grave-stone.”

“The Indian women cook well, do they not?” she asked.

“Some are not so bad as others.  One young chief boasted to me of his wife’s culinary accomplishments.  He had been bragging all the morning about his own exploits, of the men he had killed and the horses he had stolen, and then to establish his standing clearly in my mind, he added:  ‘My squaw same white squaw—­savey pie.’”

“Even there, then, the trail of the pie-crust is over them all.”

“No! only over the aristocracy.”

“I should like so much to see that wonderful country.”

“It is worth seeing,” he said, with a curious sinking of the heart, “if you are not under orders.”

He could not help thinking what a pleasant thing a journey through that Brobdingnaggian fairy-land would be with company like the young girl before him.  Nature would be twice as lovely reflected from those brown eyes.  The absurdities and annoyances of travel would be made delightful by that frank, clear laugh.  The thought of his poor Nellie flitted by him an instant, too gentle and feeble for reproach.  Another stronger thought had occupied his mind.

“You ought to see it.  Your mother will need rest before long from her Rescue-the-Perishings, and you are overworking yourself dreadfully over that sketch-book.  There is a touch of malaria about the fountain in Bluff Park.  Colorado will do you both no end of good.  I feel as if I needed it myself.  I haven’t energy enough to read Mr. Martin’s ’Life of the Prince Consort.’  I shall speak to Mrs. Belding as soon as she returns.”

“Do, by all means.  I should like to go, but mamma would not spend three nights in a sleeping-car to see the Delectable Mountains themselves.”

He rose and walked about the room, looking at the flower and the young artist from different points of view, and seeing new beauties in each continually.  There were long lapses of conversation, in which Alice worked assiduously and Farnham lounged about the conservatory, always returning with a quick word and a keen look at the face of the girl.  At last he said to himself:  “Look here!  She is not a baby.  She is nearly twenty years old.  I have been wondering why her face was so steady and wise.”  The thought that she was not a child tilled his heart with pleasure and his face with light.  But his volubility seemed to die suddenly away.  He sat for a good while in silence, and started a little as she looked up and said: