ity; but when she pointed to himself he
waited for HER to name him! In vain she tried him with all the masculine
names she knew; his was not one of them, or he would not or could not
speak it. For at times she rejected the professional dictum of the
doctor that the faculty of memory was wholly paralyzed or held in
abeyance, even to the half-automatic recollection of his letters, yet
she inconsistently began to teach him the alphabet with the same method,
and--in her sublime unconsciousness of his manhood--with the
same discipline as if he were a very child. When he had recovered
sufficiently to leave his room, she would lead him to the porch before
her window, and make him contented and happy by allowing him to watch
her at work at her desk, occasionally answering his wondering eyes with
a word, or stirring his faculties with a question. I grieve to say
that her parents had taken advantage of this publicity and his supposed
helpless condition to show their disgust of his assumption, to the
extreme of making faces at him--an act which he resented with such a
furious glare that they retreated hurriedly to their own veranda. A
fresh though somewhat inconsistent grievance was added to their previous
indictment of him: "If we ain't found dead in our bed with our throats
cut by that woman's crazy husband" (they had settled by this time that
there had been a clandestine marriage), "we'll be lucky," groaned Mrs.
Forsyth.

Meantime, the mountain summer waxed to its fullness of fire and
fruition. There were days when the crowded forest seemed choked and
impeded with its own foliage, and pungent and stifling with its own
rank maturity; when the long hillside ranks of wild oats, thickset and
impassable, filled the air with the heated dust of germination. In this
quickening irritation of life it would be strange if the unfortunate
man's torpid intellect was not helped in its awakening, and he was
allowed to ramble at will over the ranch; but with the instinct of a
domestic animal he always returned to the house, and sat in the porch,
where Josephine usually found him awaiting her when she herself returned
from a visit to the mill. Coming thence one day she espied him on the
mountain-side leaning against a projecting ledge in an attitude so rapt
and immovable that she felt compelled to approach him. He appeared to
be dumbly absorbed in the prospect, which might have intoxicated a saner
mind.

Half veiled by the heat that rose quive