Here, where the minds of other men swerved him and incited him not, where only Nature herself held him in leading-strings with unsearchable might or was laid bare before his daring eyes and many a secret discovered, Lot Gordon gained his best grace of home.  The balsam firs framed him with more truth than the door of his own dwelling.  To Madelon, as he came out from them, he looked more a man than he had ever done; for all unconsciously to her mind of strong and simple bent, he had seemed at times scarce a man but rather some strange character from a book, which had gotten life through too strong imagining.

Moreover to-day his likeness to Burr came out strongly.  Madelon saw the cant of his head and swing of his shoulders, with a half sense of shame that he was not Burr, and yet with a sudden understanding of him that she had never felt before.  She had not seen him since her betrothal to Burr.  She thought to herself that he was thinner, and that the red flush on his cheeks was the flush of fever and not of the summer sun.

“How do you do, Lot?” she said.  Madelon’s cheeks were a splendid red; her green sunbonnet hung by its strings low on her neck, and her head, with black hair clinging to her temples in moist rings, was thrust out from the green tangle of vines like a flower.  When Lot did not answer at once, but stood pale and trembling, as if an icy wind had struck him, before her, she pulled the pricking vines loose from her dress, and came out.  “How do you do, Lot?” she said, again.  Still Lot did not answer, and after a minute she turned with impatient dignity as if to enter her fastness again; but then Lot spoke.

“Like mankind,” he said, “’tis not well, and it tends to death, but we were born with a lash at our backs to do it.”

Madelon knit her brows impatiently, for this was his old talk, that savored to her of ink and parchment and thoughts laid up in studied guise, like mummies.  Then she noted his poor face, and again the look like Burr, which caused her heart to melt with the fancy of her love in like case, and she said, with that gracious kindness which became her well, that it was a pleasant day, and the smell of the balsam fir was good for him.

But Lot looked at her with his great eyes set in hungry hollows, and answered her in that stilted speech which she liked not, trying to smile his old mocking smile with his poor lips, which only trembled like a child’s when tears are coming.  “There are rivers of honey and gardens of spices, and branches dropping balm,” said Lot, “where a man can walk but his soul cannot follow him.  His soul waits outside and strives to taste the sweet when he swallows it, and smell the balm and the spices when he breathes them in, but cannot; and that is only good for a man which is good for his soul.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Madelon, shortly.