t, do you know," she said. "Unless in India,
now, a man had better be anything than a soldier. I am afraid my
brother Jim will be begging for a commission some day. I wish he would
stay quietly at home."

That was comforting. He gave up all thoughts of enlisting at once. But
now the afternoon shadows were beginning to slant longer and longer,
and it was nearly time that the Captain and Jim should make their
appearance. So Alice proposed to walk out to meet them, and, as Sam did
not say no, they went forth together.

Down the garden, faint with the afternoon scents of the flowers before
the western sun, among petunias and roses, oleander and magnolia; here
a towering Indian lily, there a thicket of scarlet geranium and
fuschia. By shady young orange trees, covered with fruit and blossom,
between rows of trellissed vines, bearing rich promise of a purple
vintage. Among fig trees and pomegranates, and so leaving the garden,
along the dry slippery grass, towards the hoarse rushing river, both
silent till they reached it. There is a silence that is golden.

They stood gazing on the foaming tide an instant, and then Alice said,--

"My father and Sam will come home by the track across there. Shall we
cross and meet them? We can get over just below."

A little lower down, all the river was collected into one headlong
race; and a giant tree, undermined by winter floods, had fallen from
one bank to the other, offering a giddy footway across the foaming
water.

"Now," said Alice, "if you will go over, I will follow you."

So he ran across, and then looked back to see the beautiful figure
tripping fearlessly over, with outstretched arms, and held out his
great brown hand to take her tiny fingers as she stepped down from the
upturned roots on to the soft white sand. He would like to have taken
them again, to help her up the bank, but she sprang up like a deer, and
would not give him the opportunity. Then they had a merry laugh at the
magpie, who had fluttered down all this way before them, to see if they
were on a foraging expedition, and if there were any plunder going, and
now could not summon courage to cross the river, but stood crooning and
cursing by the brink. Then they sauntered away, side by side, along the
sandy track, among the knolls of braken, with the sunlit boughs
whispering knowingly to one another in the evening breeze as they
passed beneath.--An evening walk long remembered by both of them.

"Oh see ye