. Hilliard suddenly remembered to be cosmopolitan, and bringing her
lorgnon into action, returned stare for stare as their driver threaded
his dexterous way through the clattering, glittering maze of four
o'clock Fifth Avenue.

With bewildering facility, she named the owners of the great
houses--usually striking amiss, though Shelby could not know--and from
some little experience with New York horse shows, could recognize an
occasional carriage occupant. Her adaptability abashed him, setting
her mysteriously apart from the woman whose past had been so intimately
linked with his, and not until they tacked across the plaza into the
wooded entrance of the park, which somehow suggested Tuscarora, did he
pluck up the old sense of comradeship. There were still glittering
equipages in plenty, and at every turn benches black with sightseers,
for the day was a bit of summer gone astray; but this and that
bright-liveried copse or shining pond or meadow cropped by sheep evoked
the familiar setting of their other rides without effacing the city
towering beyond.

"I guess you were born for this kind of thing, Cora," he broke the
silence.

The woman gave a flattered little laugh which tapered to a sigh.

"You, too, were meant for something wider than Tuscarora," she
returned; "and you will get it,--get it here, perhaps. The great New
Yorkers are usually country-born, you know. You'll find your niche--no
small one; find it and fill it; while I--? Ah, well; this isn't the
talk for your holiday."

He brushed her sleeve with a light pressure.

"Make it your holiday, too. Let yourself go."

"Our holiday, then," she assented; "no past, no future, just here and
now."

Copying nature's lead, the character of the park changed by and by; the
way rose from a sun-shot ravine and wound a wooded hill full of forest
scents and subdued surf-like echoings of the city's roar. Strange rock
upheavals with writhing strata flanked the by-paths, a mystery and an
invitation, and the man and woman left their hansom to shuffle, a pair
of children, in the fallen leaves. A squirrel, tame to familiarity,
pushed his nut-begging little nose fairly into their fingers.

"How perfectly Edenic," murmured Mrs. Hilliard. "I feel as if there
wasn't another human being besides you on earth."

Paradise before the Fall had its dinner problem to discuss, as witness
the apple affair, and so presently had Shelby and Mrs. Hilliard. But
it was the man, not