foredoomed about the valley and
about him.

"I knew you would look like this," he was saying. "How do men make a
jewel seem more beautiful? They set it in gold! And so with you, Ruth.
Your hair against the gold is darker and richer and more like piles and
coils of shadow. Your face against the gold is the transparent white,
with a bloom in it. Your hands are half lost in the softness of that
gold. And to think that is a picture you can never see! But I forget."

His face grew dark.

"Here I have stumbled again, and yet I started with strong vows and
resolves. My brother Benjamin warned me!"

It shocked her for a reason she could not analyze to hear the big man
call Connor his brother. Connor, the gambler, the schemer! And here was
David Eden with the green of the trees behind, his feet in the golden
wild flowers, and the blue sky behind his head. Brother to Ben Connor?

"And how did he warn you?" she asked.

"That I must not talk to you of yourself, because, he said, it shames
you. Is that true?"

"I suppose it is," she murmured. Yet she was a little indignant because
Connor had presumed to interfere. She knew he could only have done it to
save her from embarrassment, but she rebelled at the thought of Connor
as her conversational guardian.

Put a guard over David of Eden, and what would he be? Just like a score
of callow youths whom she had known, scattering foolish commonplaces,
trying to make their dull eyes tell her flattering things which they had
not brains enough to put into words.

"I am sorry," said David, sighing. "It is hard to stand here and see
you, and not talk of what I see. When the sun rises the birds sing in
the trees; when I see you words come up to my teeth."

He made a grimace. "Well, I'll shut them in. Have I been very wrong in
my talk to you?"

"I think you haven't talked to many women," said Ruth. "And--most men do
not talk as you do."

"Most men are fools," answered the egoist. "What I say to you is the
truth, but if the truth offends you I shall talk of other things."

He threw himself on the ground sullenly. "Of what shall I talk?"

"Of nothing, perhaps. Listen!"

For the great quiet of the valley was falling on her, and the distances
over which her eyes reached filled her with the delightful sense of
silence. There were deep blue mountains piled against the paler sky;
down the slope and through the trees the river was untarnished, solid,
silver; in the boughs behind her th