fort. "I mean your being here with another
girl. That would make an English woman jealous."

Harrison opened his dark eyes wide and looked at her in surprise. "You
don't understand--we're not flirting with each other, Maggie and
I--we're engaged." He added with an air of proffering a self-evident
explanation, "As good as married, you know."

Miss Midland seemed to find in the statement a great deal of material
for meditation, for after an "Ah!" which might mean anything, she sat
down on the other side of the tree, leaning her blonde head against its
trunk and staring up into the thick green branches. Somewhere near them
in an early-flowering yellow shrub a bee droned softly. After a time
she remarked as if to herself, "They must take marriage very seriously
in Iowa."

The young man aroused himself, to answer sleepily: "It's Illinois where
I live now--Iowa was where I grew up--but it's all the same. Yes, we
do."

After that there was another long, fragrant silence which lasted until
Harrison roused himself with a sigh, exclaiming that although he would
like nothing better than to sit right there till he took root, they had
yet to "do" the two Trianons and to see the state carriages. During
this sightseeing tour he repeated his performance of the morning in the
chateau, pouring out a flood of familiar, quaintly expressed historical
lore of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which made his
astonished listener declare he must have lived at that time.

"Nope!" he answered her. "Got it all out of Illinois libraries. Books
are great things if you're only willing to treat them right. And
history--by gracious! history is a study fit for the gods! All about
folks, and they are all that are worth while in the world!"

They were standing before the Grand Trianon as he said this, waiting
for the tram car, and as it came into sight he cried out artlessly, his
dark, aquiline face glowing with fervor, "I--I just _love_ folks!"

She looked at him curiously. "In all my life I never knew any one
before to say or think that." Some of his enthusiasm was reflected upon
her own fine, thoughtful face as a sort of wistfulness when she added,
"It must make you very happy. I wish I could feel so."

"You don't look at them right," he protested.

She shook her head. "No, we haven't known the same kind. I had never
even heard of the sort of people you seem to have known."

The tram car came noisily up to them, and no more was said.