with him when they went on their walks. She even encouraged him to work, by making him read his translation aloud to her and by pretending to be interested with him in the solution of his "deductions." And as long as he was with her, he could work. It was when he was at his desk in school, or shut up in his room at home, that she kept him idle, his eyes set on the memory of her, and his book forgotten in his hand.
Conroy accompanied them sometimes, but not often. He could be with her of an evening, when Don could not; and though there was no rivalry between them, he knew that Don would not wish to share her, and boyishly he held aloof. They went alone to their green alcoves and grassed recesses, like a pair of lovers in a poem, but with a childish spirit. There were blue-birds to wonder at, the first hepaticas to find, a water-rat for Dexter to go mad about, and the lurking violets, at last, in a sudden, shy profusion. Don broke off the odorous branches of firs and hemlocks to make a dry seat for her, one day after it had rained; and then he backed the seat with a screen of foliage and made her a rough bower. As the weather grew warmer, she felt less like romping along the stream, and they sat oftener in this arbour; and while she listened dreamily, with her head against his arm, he read aloud from his Spenser's "Faerie Queene." Many of the lines were printed in asterisks, because—Don explained—the manuscript had been old and torn, he supposed. But there was much there of knights "yclad in mighty arms" who rode through the woods
