che. At these wide shallows, Janet's gossip ceased
while she held to his coat-sleeve and kept her eye on the water as it
hurried through the spokes and rose steadily to the hub. But when the
stout pony pulled them up the opposite bank and the road lay before
them the same length as before, she again took up the thread of the
conversation. As everybody knows, a conversation can lead almost
anywhere; the talk will get to wherever it is going by some route as
long as words point the way, and always the story of one's _self_ will
leak through the sentences in the end. And where is there anything so
conducive to the objects of conversation as a Rockaway buggy wheeling
it over the cushioned sward and the flowers trooping by? We are not
going to intrude upon their pleasant situation; suffice it to say that
as time passed he became more and more Steve Brown and she became
increasingly Janet.

It was about the middle of the forenoon when they reached Belleville,
the prairie highway becoming now a shady homestead street, with
Southern cottages ensconced in vines and shrubbery and sheltered by
prosperous trees. Presently they turned into a street of stores which
delivered them finally to a hitching-rack at the end of a walk leading
up to the steps of the court-house.

The Professor, it devolved upon inquiry, was busy just at present, but
if the young lady would step up to his room he would give her an
examination shortly. Steve, being thus left to himself, went outside
again. At the side of the gravel walk was a green bench presided over
by a china-berry tree; he sat down here and waited. Occasionally a
passer-by diversified the tenor of his waiting--now a straight-paced
lawyer garbed in black and thinking dark thoughts; again, a leisurely
stockman arrayed like himself with sombrero and spurs. His own spurs
he had not thought to remove since he got back that morning. The
little town, like other county capitals, had an atmosphere that was
half the hush of the court-room and partly the quiet of academic
groves, in which state of being the inhabitants were peacefully and
permanently established, the court-house being, in truth, Belleville's
principal industry.

Having nodded to several and encountered none that he was well
acquainted with, he arose and went into the court-house again. After a
spell of indecision in the corridor, he turned and proceeded up the
dark-banistered stairs to the second story. At the head of