Alice was still more distracted and in sympathy with Philip’s evident aspirations by her own love for Evelyn and her growing admiration for the girl’s character.  It so happened that mutual sympathy—­who can say how it was related to Philip?—­had drawn them much together, and chance had given them many opportunities for knowing each other.  Alice had so far come out of her shell, and broken the reserve of her life, as to make frequent visits at the inn, and Mrs. Mavick and Evelyn found it the most natural and agreeable stroll by the river-side to the farmhouse, where naturally, while the mother amused herself with the original eccentricities of Patience, her daughter grew into an intimacy with Alice.

As for the feelings of Evelyn in these days—­her first experience of something like freedom in the world—­the historian has only universal experience to guide him.  In her heart was working the consciousness that she had been singled out as worthy to share the confidence of a man in his most secret ambitions and aspirations, in the dreams of youth which seemed to her so noble.  For these aspirations and dreams concerned the world in which she had lived most and felt most.

If Philip had talked to her as he had to Celia about his plans for success in life she would have been less interested.  But there was nothing to warn her personally in these unworldly confessions.  Nor did Philip ever seem to ask anything of her except sympathy in his ideas.  And then there was the friendship of Alice, which could not but influence the girl.  In the shelter of that the intercourse of the summer took on natural relations.  For some natures there is no nurture of love like the security of family protection, under cover of which there is so little to excite the alarm of a timid maiden.

It was fortunate for Philip that Miss McDonald took a liking to him.  They were thrown much together.  They were both good walkers, and liked to climb the hills and explore the wild mountain streams.  Philip would have confessed that he was fond of nature, and fancied there was a sort of superiority in his attitude towards it to that of his companion, who was merely interested in plants-just a botanist.  This attitude, which she perceived, amused Miss McDonald.

“If you American students,” she said one day when they were seated on a fallen tree in the forest, and she was expatiating on a rare plant she had found, “paid no more attention to the classics than to the world you live in, few of you would get a degree.”

“Oh, some fellows go in for that sort of thing,” Philip replied.  “But I have noticed that all English women have some sort of fad—­plants, shells, birds, something special.”

“Fad!” exclaimed the Scotchwoman.  “Yes, I suppose it is, if reading is a fad.  It is one way of finding out about things.  You admire what the Americans call scenery; we, since you provoke me to say it, love nature —­I mean its individual, almost personal manifestations.  Every plant has a distinct character of its own.  I saw the other day an American landscape picture with a wild, uncultivated foreground.  There was not a botanical thing in it.  The man who painted it didn’t know a sweetbrier from a thistle.