ned, gained the path, ran up it, walked
by three or four pretty loiterers, ran again, and on the stone by the
water-side found the volume as she had left it.

Then she lingered. As she leaned against the rock and gazed into the
shaded depths of the mill-stream her problem came again, and the
beautiful solitude whispered a welcome to her to revolve and weigh and
solve it here. But when she essayed to do so it would no more be
revolved or weighed by her alone than this huge bowlder at her side. Her
baffled mind drifted into fantasy, and the hoary question, Whether it is
wiser for a maiden to love first, hoping to be chosen accordingly, or to
be chosen first and hope to love accordingly, became itself an age-worn
relic from woman's earlier and harder lot, left by its glaciers as they
had melted in the warmth of more modern suns.

She murmured a word of impatience at such dreaming and looked around to
see if she was overheard; but the only near presence was two girls
sitting behind and high above her, one writing, the other reading, under
the pines. They seemed not to have heard, but she sauntered beyond their
sight up the path, wondering if they were the kind in whom to love was
the necessity it was in her, and, if so, what they would do in her case.
What they would advise _her_ to do depended mainly, she fancied, on
whether they were in their teens or their twenties. As for married
women, she shrank from the very thought of their counsel, whichever way
it might tend, and mused on Fannie Ravenel, who, with eyes wide open,
had chosen rather to be made unhappy by the one her love had lighted on
than to take any other chance for happiness. She stopped her listless
walk and found her wrists crossed and her hands knit, remembering one
whom Fannie could have chosen and would not.

Burning with resentment against herself for the thought, she turned
aside and sat down on the river's brink in a shade of hemlocks. "Come,"
her actions seemed to say, "I will think of Henry Fair; gentle, noble
Henry Fair, and what he is and will and might be; of how I love his
mother and all his kindred; of how tenderly I admire him; and of his
trembling words, 'I love you consumingly!'"

Her heart quickened gratefully, as though he spoke again; but as she
gazed down at the bubbles that floated by from a dipping bough she
presently fell to musing anew on Fannie, without that inward shudder
which the recollection of Fannie's course and fate commonly