"Your gown of 'hodden-gray' is wonderfully becoming, Beck," Lennox said
again and again with a secret exulting pride in her.

Their plans for the future took tone from their blissful, unconventional
life. They could not settle down until they had seen the world. They
would go here and there, and perhaps, if they found it pleasanter so,
not settle down at all. There were certain clay-white, closely built
villages, whose tumble-down houses jostled each other upon divers
precipitous cliffs on the wayside between Florence and Rome, toward
which Lennox's compass seemed always to point. He rather argued that the
fact of their not being dilated upon in the guide-books rendered them
additionally interesting. Rebecca had her fancies too, and together
they managed to talk a good deal of tender, romantic nonsense, which
was purely their own business, and gave the summer days a delicate yet
distinct flavor.

The evening after the sketch was made they spent upon the mountain
side together. When they stopped to rest, Lennox flung himself upon the
ground at Rebecca's feet, and lay looking up at the far away blue of the
sky in which a slow-flying bird circled lazily. Rebecca, with a cluster
of pink and white laurel in her hand, proceeded with a metaphysical and
poetical harangue she had previously begun.

"To my eyes," she said, "it has a pathetic air of loneliness--pathetic
and yet not exactly sorrowful. It knows nothing but its own pure, brave,
silent life. It is only pathetic to a worldling--worldlings like us. How
fallen we must be to find a life desolate because it has only nature for
a companion!"

She stopped with an idle laugh, waiting for an ironical reply from the
"worldling" at her feet; but he remained silent, still looking upward at
the clear, deep blue.

As she glanced toward him she saw something lying upon the grass between
them, and bent to pick it up. It was the sketch which he had forgotten
and which had slipped from the portfolio.

"You have dropped something," she said, and seeing what it was, uttered
an exclamation of pleasure.

He came back to earth with a start, and, recognizing the sketch, looked
more than half irritated.

"Oh, it is that, is it?" he said.

"It is perfect!" she exclaimed. "What a pictare it will make!"

"It is not to be a picture," he answered. "It was not intended to be
anything more than a sketch."

"But why not?" she asked. "It is too good to lose. You never had such a
model