March had come up by rail some fifteen miles
beyond the brisk inland city just mentioned and stopped at a certain
"Mount"--no matter what--known to him only through casual allusions in
one or two letters of--a friend. Here he had crossed a hand-ferry,
climbed a noted hill, put up at its solitary mountain house--being tired
of walls and pavements, as he had more than once needlessly
explained--and at his chamber window sat looking down, until most of
them had vanished, upon a cluster of soft lights on the other side of
the valley, shining among the trees of the embowered town where one who
now was never absent from his thoughts was at school.

The knowledge that he loved her was not of yesterday only. He could
count its age in weeks and a fraction, beginning with the evening when
"those two Southerners" had met in Mrs. Fair's drawing-room. Since then
the dear trouble of it had ever been with him, deep, silent, dark--like
this night on the mountain--shot with meteors of brief exultation, and
starlighted with recollections of her every motion, glance, and word.

At sunrise, looking again, he saw the town's five or six spires, and
heard one tell the hour and the college bell confirm it. Care was on his
brow, but you could see it was a care that came of new freedom. He was
again a lover, still tremorous with the wonder of unsought deliverance
from his dungeon of not-loving. And now the stern yet inspiring
necessity was not to let his delivering angel find it out; to be a
lover, but not a suitor. Hence his presence up here instead of down in
the town beyond the meadows and across the river. He would make it very
plain to her and her friends that he had not come, ahead of his business
appointment, to thrust himself upon her, but to get a breath of heaven's
own air--being very tired of walls and pavements--and to--to discover
the bobolink!

Of course, being so near, he should call. He must anyhow go to church,
and if only he could keep himself from starting too early, there was no
reason why he should not combine the two duties and make them one
pleasure. Should he ride or drive? He ordered the concern's best
saddle-horse, walked mournfully half round him, and said, "I reckon--I
reckon I'll drive. Sorry to trouble you, but----"

"Put him in the shafts, Dave," said the stable-keeper, and then to the
guest, "No trouble, sir; if a man doesn't feel safe in a saddle he'd
better not monkey with it."

"I dare say," sedately resp