re in the face at that moment, because the man, as he looked up
at her, became nothing but a dazzled mirror from which was reflected
back to her the most flattering image of her own appearance. Almost
actually she saw herself as she appeared to him, a wood-nymph,
kneeling by the flowing water, vital, exquisite, strong, radiant in a
cool flush, her uncovered hair gleaming in a thousand loosened waves.
Like most comely women of intelligence Sylvia was intimately familiar
with every phase of her own looks, and she knew down to the last
blood-corpuscle that she had never looked better. But almost at once
came the stab that Felix Morrison was not the man who was looking at
her, and the heartsick recollection that he would never again be there
to see her. Her moment of honest joy in being lovely passed. She stood
up with a clouded face, soberly pulled down her sleeves, and picked up
her hat.

"Oh, why don't you leave it off?" said the man across the brook.
"You'd be so much more comfortable!" She knew that he meant her hair
was too pretty to cover, and did not care what he meant. "All right,
I'll carry it," she assented indifferently.

He did not stir, gazing up at her frankly admiring. Sylvia made out,
from the impression he evidently now had of her, that her face had
really been very, very dirty; and at the recollection of that absurd
ascent of the mountain by those two black-faced, twig-chewing
individuals, a return of irrepressible laughter quivered on her lips.
Before his eyes, as swiftly, as unaccountably, as utterly as an April
day shifts its moods, she had changed from radiant, rosy wood-goddess
to saddened mortal and thence on into tricksy, laughing elf. He burst
out on her, "Who _are_ you, anyhow?"

She remembered with a start. "Why, that's so, Molly didn't mention my
name--isn't that like Molly! Why, I'm Sylvia Marshall,"

"You may be _named_ Sylvia Marshall!" he said, leaving an inference in
the air like incense.

"Well, yes, to be sure," rejoined Sylvia; "I heard somebody only the
other day say that an introduction was the quaintest of grotesques,
since people's names are the most--"

He applied a label with precision. "Oh, you know Morrison?"

She was startled at this abrupt emergence of the name which secretly
filled her mind and was aware with exasperation that she was blushing.
Her companion appeared not to notice this. He was attempting the
difficult feat of wiping his face on the upper part of his s