not a beauty,
judged rigidly, still he had found in her soft, clear eye, in her color,
her charming voice, even in her little gestures, something which reached
him as an artist and touched him as a man.

"One cannot exactly account for other women's paling before her," he
said to himself; "but they do--and lose significance." And then he
laughed tenderly. At this moment, it was true, every other thing on
earth paled and lost significance.

That the family of his host had retired made itself evident to him when
he dismounted at the house. To the silence of the night was added the
silence of slumber. No one was to be seen; a small cow, rendered lean
by active climbing in search of sustenance, breathed peacefully near
the tumble-down fence; the ubiquitous, long-legged, yellow dog, rendered
trustful by long seclusion, aroused himself from his nap to greet the
arrival with a series of heavy raps upon the rickety porch-floor with
a solid but languid tail. Lennox stepped over him in reaching for the
gourd hanging upon the post, and he did not consider it incumbent upon
himself to rise.

In a little hollow at the road-side was the spring from which the
household supplies of water were obtained. Finding none in the wooden
bucket, Lennox took the gourd with the intention of going down to the
hollow to quench his thirst.

"We've powerful good water," his host had said in the afternoon, "'n'
it's nigh the house, too. I built the house yer a-purpose,--on 'count of
its be-in' nigh."

He was unconsciously dwelling upon this statement as he walked, and
trying to recall correctly the mountain drawl and twang.

"She," he said (there was only one "she" for him to-night)--"she will
be sure to catch it and reproduce it in all its shades to the life."

He was only a few feet from the spring itself and he stopped with a
sharp exclamation of the most uncontrollable amazement,--stopped and
stared straight before him. It was a pretty, dell-like place, darkly
shadowed on one side but bathed in the flooding moonlight on the other,
and it was something he saw in this flood of moonlight which almost
caused him to doubt for the moment the evidence of his senses.

How it was possible for him to believe that there really could stand in
such a spot a girl attired in black velvet of stagy cut and trimmings,
he could not comprehend; but a few feet from him there certainly stood
such a girl, who bent her lithe, round shape over the spring, gazing