It was not until Dudley rose to go that he came over to her and took her hand.

“Good-night,” he said, his ardent eyes upon her.  “I’m to have that ride to-morrow?  You know I came for it.”

The unreasoning blood beat in her face as she turned away, and she was conscious that he had seen and misconstrued the senseless blush.  It was her misfortune to go red or pale without cause and to show an impassive face above deep emotion.

The next morning she rode with Dudley, and the day after he came out before returning to Richmond.  She experienced a certain pleasure in the contact with his bouyant optimism, but it was not without a sensation of relief that she watched him depart after his last visit.  It seemed to leave her more to herself—­and to Nicholas.

That afternoon she walked with him far across the fields, and they laid together phantasmal foundations of their future lives.  Perhaps the chief thing to be said of their intercourse was that it was to each a mental stimulant as well as an emotional delight.  Eugenia’s quick, untutored mind, which had run to seed like an uncultivated garden, blossomed from contact with his practical, unpolished intellect.  He taught her logic and a little law; she taught him poetry and passion.  He argued his cases to her and swept her back into the days of his old political dreams—­dreams from which he had awakened, but which still hovered as memories in his waking hours.  Sometimes he brought his books to Battle Hall, and they read together beneath the general’s unseeing eyes; but more often they sat side by side in the pasture or the wood, the volume lying open between them.  He was the first man who had ever spurred her into thought; she was the first woman he had ever loved.

As they walked across the fields this afternoon they drifted back to the question of themselves and their own happiness.  It was only a matter of waiting, she said, of the patient passage of time; and they were so sure of each other that all else was unimportant—­to be disregarded.

“But am I sure of you?” he demanded.

It was not a personal distrust of Eugenia that he voiced; it was the hardened state of disbelief in his own happiness which showed itself when the first intoxication of passion was lived out.

“Why, of course you are,” she readily rejoined.  “Am I not sure of you?  You are as much mine as my eyes—­or my hand.”

“Oh, I am different!” he exclaimed.  “A beggar doesn’t prove faithless to a princess—­but what do you see in me, after all?”

She laughed.  “I see a very moody lover.”

They had reached a little deserted spring in the pasture called “Poplar Spring,” after the six great poplars which grew beside it.  Eugenia seated herself on a fallen log beside the tiny stream which trickled over the smooth, round stones, bearing away, like miniature floats, the yellow leaves that fell ceaselessly from the huge branches above.