“I don’t believe you know how I love you,” he said suddenly.

“Tell me,” she insatiably demanded.

“If I could tell you I shouldn’t love you as I do.  There are some things one can’t talk about—­but you are life itself—­and you are all heaven and all hell to me.”

“I don’t want to be hellish,” she put in provokingly.

“But you are—­when I think you may slip from me, after all.”

The yellow leaves fluttered over them—­over the fallen log and over the bright green moss beside the little spring.  As Eugenia turned towards him, a single leaf fell from her hair to the ground.

“Oh!  You are thinking of Dudley Webb!” she said, and laughed because jealousy was her own darling sin.

“Yes, I am thinking—­” he began, when she stopped him.

“Well, you needn’t.  You may just stop at once.  I—­love—­you—­Nick—­Burr.  Say it after me.”

He shook his head.  Her hand lay on the log beside him, and his own closed over it.  As it did so, she contrasted its hardened palm with the smooth surface of Dudley Webb’s.  The contrast touched her, and, with a swift, warm gesture, she raised the clasped hands to her cheek.

“I told you once I liked your hand,” she said.  “Well—­I love it.”

He turned upon her a hungry glance.

“I would work it to the bone for you,” he answered.  “But—­it is long to wait.”

“Yes, it is long to wait,” she repeated, but her tone had not the heaviness of his.  Waiting in its wider sense means little to a woman—­and in a moment she cheerfully returned to a prophetic future.

A few days later Bernard came, and she saw Nicholas less often.  Her affection for her brother, belonging, as it did, to the dominant family feeling which possessed her soul, was filled with an almost maternal solicitude.  He absorbed her with a spasmodic, half selfish, wholly insistent appeal.  She received his confidences, wrote his letters, and tied his cravats.  Upon his last visit home he had spent the greater part of his time in Kingsborough; now he rode in seldom, and invariably returned in a moody and depressed condition.

“You’re worth the whole bunch of them,” he had said to her of other girls, “you dear old Eugie.”

And she had warmed and laid a faithful hand on his arm.  It was characteristic of her that no call for affection went disregarded—­that the sensitive fibres of her nature quivered beneath any caressing hand.

“Do you really like me best?” she asked.

“Don’t I?” He laughed his impulsive, boyish laugh—­“I’ll prove it by letting you go in for the mail this afternoon.  I detest Kingsborough!”

“Oh!  No, no, I love it, but I suppose it is dull for you.”

She ordered the carriage and went upstairs to put on her hat.  When she came down Bernard was not in sight, and she drove off, wondering why he or any one else should detest Kingsborough.