jovially; "but I 'low the mammy is used to pretty high feedin'." He had
seen Mrs. Yorke driving along in much richer attire than usually dazzled
the eyes of the Ridge neighborhood, and had gauged her with a
shrewd eye.

Miss Alice Yorke's sprain turned out to be less serious than had been
expected. She herself had proved a much less refractory patient than her
mother had ever known her.

It does not take two young people of opposite sexes long to overcome the
formalities which convention has fixed among their seniors, especially
when one of them has brought the other down a mountain-side in his arms.

Often, in a sheltered corner of the long verandah, Keith read to Alice
on balmy afternoons, or in the moonlit evenings sauntered with her
through the fields of their limited experience, and quoted snatches from
his chosen favorites, poems that lived in his heart, and fancied her the
"maid of the downward look and sidelong glance."

Thus, by the time Alice Yorke was able to move about again, she and
Keith had already reached a footing where they had told each other a
good deal of their past, and were finding the present very pleasant, and
one of them, at least, was beginning, when he turned his eyes to the
future, to catch the glimmer of a very rosy light.

It showed in his appearance, in his face, where a new expression of a
more definite ambition and a higher resolution was beginning to take
its place.

Dr. Balsam noted it, and when he met Gordon he began to have a quizzical