Now at twenty-five she awoke each morning with a smile for the sunlight and a proprietary joy in the blue of the skies and a delight for the roses whose hearts were no younger than her own had become.  Bridge-tables and tennis courts saw little of her, because the woods were waiting and Jefferson Edwardes was there to tramp and ride and fish and be companion and guide.

It was most beautiful far back from the oiled roads and trimmed hedges, for here were only woodland voices and languorous forest fragrances.  Here, too, hid all those wild flowers that in childhood she had known and fancifully christened—­and since forgotten, and here two people with the lilt of this abundant June song in their hearts could leave a few of their years by the roadside and forget them.  To Mary Burton it was all a rediscovery and a miracle.  He had promised to give her back the message of her hills.  He was giving her back the joy of life.

One afternoon she and Jefferson Edwardes were tramping toward a brook where the trout would be flashing like phantom darts, and as he led the way along a narrow trail she followed him with a smile on her lips.

At a sheer twist around the hill’s shoulder he stopped and pointed his hand.  The view from there was almost county-wide, billowing away across heights and depths to a blue merging of hill and sky.

As she stood by his side her eyes and parted lips spoke her unworded appreciation and the man’s gaze came back from the broad picture and dwelt upon her.

“It’s strange,” she said finally with a vaguely puzzled expression, “that I who was born in just such hills as these should now be realizing their wonder for the first time.”

But her companion laughed at her seriousness.  “When you knew them first,” he reminded her, “you had nothing else with which to compare them.  It is one who comes from the north who finds a marvel in the bigness and softness of southern stars.  Now you have been away—­and have come home, dearest.”

She was standing very lancelike and straight by the slender bole of a silver birch.  A golden sun flooded richly through the greenery.  Overhead was a tunefully unflecked sky and into the shadows crept a richness of furtively underlying color and echoes of color.  It was all vivid and beautiful and the girl standing there seemed to dominate its vividness and its beauty.  But her eyes were grave, even when a shaft of the radiance struck her delicately blossoming cheeks and played upon the escaping locks with which the breeze played, too.

“Do you know, I suppose in a way I ought to hate you?” she told the man, and he swiftly demanded: 

“Hate me?  In heaven’s name, why?”

“When a woman has been deluded into believing herself a bird of paradise ... and has been content with her feathers, it doesn’t precisely help to discover that—­” her voice grew self-contemptuous—­“that after all she has only lived the life of a Strassburg goose and has been fed to death until she is no earthly good for anything except to be some glutton’s delicacy—­”