Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregular curves to the breezy upland where the great highroad to Prague ran through fields of harvest.  They had come by heights and slopes of forest, where the serried stems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-blue and grew straight as stalks of grain; and now on either side the farms opened under a sky of unwonted cloudlessness.  Narrow strips of wheat and rye, which the men were cutting with sickles, and the women in red bodices were binding, alternated with ribands of yellowing oats and grass, and breadths of beets and turnips, with now and then lengths of ploughed land.  In the meadows the peasants were piling their carts with heavy rowen, the girls lifting the hay on the forks, and the men giving themselves the lighter labor of ordering the load.  From the upturned earth, where there ought to have been troops of strutting crows, a few sombre ravens rose.  But they could not rob the scene of its gayety; it smiled in the sunshine with colors which vividly followed the slope of the land till they were dimmed in the forests on the far-off mountains.  Nearer and farther, the cottages and villages shone in the valleys, or glimmered through the veils of the distant haze.  Over all breathed the keen pure air of the hills, with a sentiment of changeless eld, which charmed March, back to his boyhood, where he lost the sense of his wife’s presence, and answered her vaguely.  She talked contentedly on in the monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men learn to resign themselves.  They were both roused from their vagary by the voice of General Triscoe.  He was handing back the folded newspaper to Stoller, and saying, with a queer look at him over his glasses, “I should like to see what your contemporaries have to say to all that.”

“Well, sir,” Stoller returned, “maybe I’ll have the chance to show you.  They got my instructions over there to send everything to me.”

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the landscape as landscape.  They agreed that the human interest was the great thing on a landscape, after all; but they ignored the peasants in the fields and meadows, who were no more to them than the driver on the box, or the people in the two-spanner behind.  They were talking of the hero and heroine of a novel they had both read, and he was saying, “I suppose you think he was justly punished.”

“Punished?” she repeated.  “Why, they got married, after all!”

“Yes, but you could see that they were not going to be happy.”

“Then it seems to me that she was punished; too.”

“Well, yes; you might say that.  The author couldn’t help that.”

Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said: 

“I always thought the author was rather hard on the hero.  The girl was very exacting.”

“Why,” said Burnamy, “I supposed that women hated anything like deception in men too much to tolerate it at all.  Of course, in this case, he didn’t deceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn’t that worse?”