"It
would make me very unhappy."

"That is where you and I differ," said I.

Mabel was silent for a moment, and I believe she was a little hurt,
for I had spoken rather sharply.

"But what good would it do you, Jamie?" asked she, looking up at me
from under her wide-brimmed straw hat.

"What would do me good?" said I, for I had quite forgotten what we had
been talking about.

"To see things as they are. There is my father now; he knows a great
deal, and I am sure I shouldn't care to know any more than he does."

"Well, that is where you and I differ," said I again.

"I wish you wouldn't be always saying 'that is where you and I
differ.' Somehow I don't like to hear you say it. It doesn't sound
like yourself."

And Mabel turned away from me, took up a leaf from the ground and
began to pick it to pieces.

We were sitting, at the time when this conversation took place, up in
the gorge not half a mile from the house where Mabel's father lived. I
was a tutor in the college, about twenty-three years old, and I was
very fond of German philosophy. And now, since I have told who I was,
I suppose I ought to tell you something about Mabel. Mabel was,--but
really it is impossible to say what she was, except that she was very,
very charming. As for the rest, she was the daughter of Professor
Markham, and I had known her since my college days when she was quite
a little girl. And now she wore long dresses; and, what was more, she
had her hair done up in a sort of Egyptian pyramid on the top of her
head. The dress she had on to-day I was particularly fond of; it was
of a fine light texture, and the pattern was an endless repetition of
a small, sweet-brier bud, with two delicate green leaves attached to
it.

I had spread a shawl out on the ground where Mabel was sitting, for
fear she should soil her fine dress. A large weeping-willow spread its
branches all around us, and drooped until it almost touched the
ground, so that it made a sort of green, sunlit summer-house, for
Mabel and me to live in. Between the rocks at our feet a clear brook
came rushing down, throwing before it little showers of spray, which
fell like crystal pearls on the water, sailed down the swift eddies
and then vanished in the next whirlpool. A couple of orioles in
brand-new yellow uniforms, with black epaulets on their shoulders,
were busy in the tree over our heads, but stopped now and then in
their work to refresh themselves with a little impromp