ceship with
Page, found herself obliged entirely to reconstruct an impression of
him. It was with anything but a rich man's arrogant certainty of
her interest that he said, very simply as he said everything: "I
appreciate very much, Miss Marshall, your being willing to come along
and see all this. It's a part of your general kindness to everybody.
I hope it won't bore you to extremity. I'm so heart and soul in it
myself, I shan't know when to stop talking about it. In fact I shan't
want to stop, even if I know I should. I've never said much about it
to any one before, and I very much want your opinion on it."

Sylvia felt a decent pinch of shame, and her eyes were not brilliant
with sardonic irony but rather dimmed with self-distrust as she
answered with a wholesome effort for honesty: "I really don't know a
single thing about forestry, Mr. Page. You'll have to start in at the
very beginning, and explain everything. I hope I've sense enough
to take an intelligent interest." Very different, this, from the
meretricious sparkle of her, "Oh yes, _do_ show me, Mr. Page." She
felt that to be rather cheap, as she remembered it. She wondered if he
had seen its significance, had seen through her. From a three weeks'
intensive acquaintance with him, she rather thought he had. His eyes
were clear, formidably so. He put her on her mettle.

Arnold had lighted his cigarette by this time, offered one to Page
with his incurable incapacity to remember that not every sane man
smokes, and on being refused, put his hands deep in his pockets. The
three tall young people were making short work of the stretch of
sunny, windy, upland pasture, and were already almost in the edge of
the woods which covered the slope of the mountain above them up to the
very crest, jewel-green against the great, piled, cumulus clouds.

"Well, I _will_ begin at the beginning, then," said Page. "I'll
begin back in 1762, when this valley was settled and my
ever-so-many-greats-grandfather took possession of a big slice of this
side of Hemlock Mountain, with the sole idea that trees were men's
enemies. The American colonists thought of forests, you know, as
places for Indians to lurk, spots that couldn't be used for corn,
growths to be exterminated as fast as possible."

They entered the woods now, walking at a good pace up the steeply
rising, grass-grown wood-road. Sylvia quite consciously summoned all
her powers of attention and concentration for the hour before