“I wish devoutly that I had been there,” seizing the little hand that was mournfully tapping the weatherbeaten stone, and forcing the downcast eyes to look at me.  “I think, both together, we could have pacified Aunt Sloman.”

It was a diversion, and after a little while Bessie professed she had had enough of the church steps.

“How those people do stare!  Is it the W——­s, do you think, Charlie?  I heard yesterday they were coming.”

From our lofty position on the hillside we commanded the road leading out of the village—­the road that was all alive with carriages on this beautiful September morning.  The W——­ carriage had half halted to reconnoitre, and had only not hailed us because we had sedulously looked another way.

“Let’s get away,” I said, “for the next carriage will not only stop, but come over;” and Bessie suffered herself to be led through the little tangle of brier and fern, past the gray old gravestones with “Miss Faith” and “Miss Mehitable” carved upon them, and into the leafy shadow of the waiting woods.

Other lovers have been there before us, but the trees whisper no secrets save their own.  The subject of our previous discussion was not resumed, nor was Fanny Meyrick mentioned, until on our homeward road we paused a moment on the hilltop, as we always did.

It is indeed a hill of vision, that church hill at Lenox.  Sparkling far to the south, the blue Dome lay, softened and shining in the September sun.  There was ineffable peace in the faint blue sky, and, stealing up from the valley, a shimmering haze that seemed to veil the bustling village and soften all the rural sounds.

Bessie drew nearer to me, shading her eyes as she looked down into the valley:  “Charlie dear, let us stay here always.  We shall be happier, better here than to go back to New York.”

“And the law-business?” I asked like a brutal bear, bringing the realities of life into my darling’s girlish dream.

“Can’t you practice law in Foxcroft, and drive over there every morning?  People do.”

“And because they do, and there are enough of them, I must plod along in the ways that are made for me already.  We can make pilgrimages here, you know.”

“I suppose so,” said Bessie with a sigh.

Just then Fanny Kemble’s clock in the tower above us struck the hour—­one, two, three.

“Bless me! so late?  And there’s that phaeton coming back over the hill again.  Hurry, Charlie! don’t let them see us.  They’ll think that we’ve been here all the time.”  And Bessie plunged madly down the hill, and struck off into the side-path that leads into the Lebanon road.  The last vibrations of the bell were still trembling on the air as I caught up with her again.

But again the teasing mood of the morning had come over her.  Quite out of breath with the run, as we sat down to rest on the little porch of Mrs. Sloman’s cottage she said, very earnestly, “But you haven’t once said it.”