aged and the blind—all as quiet as prisons—the field-hospitals for that army of workers encamped in the city below. And they ended on the veranda of a café crowning a breezy hill-top above the river valley and facing a peacefully wooded horizon that was smoke-blue in the mist of a humid midsummer afternoon.
There they ate tricoloured ices and drank cool drinks, while Pittsey and Miss Arden discussed the affairs of "the profesh," and Miss Morris turned to the breeze with a thoughtful languor that showed in the slow movements of her eyes as she looked from the river up the sides of the valley and across the hill-tops, peak after peak. When Pittsey proposed that they stroll down the slope through the inviting underwoods, she said: "I'll wait for you here."
It was Don who remained, by tacit consent of the others, to keep her company.
She watched a bird soaring and sailing over the valley; and she asked, without taking her eyes from it: "Won't you smoke?" He replied, in the same tone, that it would be "a crime" to soil such a breeze with the smell of tobacco. The bosom of her light gown rose and fell over a long sigh: she laid her arm along the veranda rail, and the drooping line from her round shoulder to her curved wrist and relaxed hand had the unstudied grace of all her unconscious poses. He smiled with an æsthetic satisfaction in her beauty that repeated the repose of the calm distance and held the colour of his mood; and he was the more irritated—by the intrusion of the world they had left behind them—when she asked abruptly: "Are you going on the stage?"
