couldn't sleep. The music got into my head."

"Into mine also. But I often take a canter at sunrise. It is my hour."

"And this is your road?"

"Not always. I go different ways. This one I call the
road-to-what-might-have-been because it turns off just as it reaches a
glorious view."

"Then don't let's travel it. I'd rather go with you on the
road-to-what-is-to-be."

She looked at me steadily for a minute with arching brows. "I wonder why
they say of you that you have no social amenities?" she observed
mockingly.

"I haven't. That isn't an amenity, it is a fact. To save my life I
couldn't find a blessed thing to say last night to the little lady in
pink tarlatan whose dress I tore."

"Poor Bessy!" she laughed softly, "she vows she'll never waltz with you
again."

"She's perfectly safe to vow it."

"Oh, yes, I remember, and I hope you won't dance any more. Do you know,
I like you better out-of-doors."

"Out-of-doors?"

"Well, the broomsedge is becoming to you. It seems your natural
background somehow. Now it makes George Bolingbroke look frivolous."

"His natural background is the ballroom, and I'm not sure he hasn't the
best of it. I can't live always in the broomsedge."

"Oh, it isn't only the broomsedge, though that goes admirably with your
hair--it's the bigness, the space, the simplicity. You take up too much
room among lamps and palms, you trip on a waxed floor, and down goes
poor Bessy. But out here you are natural and at home. The sky sets off
your head--and it's really very fine if you only knew it. Out here, with
me, you are in your native element."

"Is that because you are my native element? Can you imagine poor Bessy
fitting into the picture?"

"To tell the truth I can't imagine poor Bessy fitting you at all. Her
native element is pink tarlatan."

"And yours?" I demanded.

"That you must find out for yourself." A smile played on her face like
an edge of light.

"The sunrise," I answered.

"Like you, I am sorry that I can't be always in my proper setting," she
replied.

"You are always. The sunrise never leaves you."

Her brows arched merrily, and I saw the tiny scar I had remembered from
childhood catch up the corner of her mouth with its provoking and
irresistible trick of expression.

"Do you mean to tell me that you learned these gallantries in Johnson's
Dictionary?" she enquired, "or have you taken other lessons from the
General besides those in speculations?"

I had got