She had put on a long coat of dove-colored cloth—­one of the fine garments that Philip Alston was always finding for her—­on account of the cool weather, and she was wearing her gypsy bonnet tied down with its three-cornered handkerchief of white lace, so that she was all ready for going further from the house.  In another moment she was skimming down the river bank toward the boy.  He saw her coming; but she moved so like a darting swallow that he barely had time to hide his book under the mossy log on which he was sitting before she fluttered into a seat beside him, nestling against his arm.

“There now!” she sighed, smoothing down her skirts.  “Now we can have a nice long talk about love.”

The boy moved with the uneasiness that every boy feels at any abstract approach to the great topic.  The girl went straight on, with all the serenity of the least experienced of her sex.  Her big blue eyes were gravely fixed on his reddened face.  Her own was quite calm, and very serious indeed.  Her soft lips were set as firmly as one rose leaf may be folded against another.  The tips of her little fingers met in wisdom’s gesture.

“Listen, David, dear.  Listen well, and think hard.  I have been thinking a great deal about love lately.  It is right, you know, that all young people should.  I will tell you everything that I have thought, and then you must tell me what you think.  For there are some things that I can’t find out by myself, though I have tried and tried.  And boys ought to know more than girls about love.  But I don’t believe they do!”

The blue eyes gazed at him rather severely from under the gypsy hat.  It was the woman arraigning the man with the eternal challenge.  The boy looked down at the ground, and tried not to feel guilty, as the challenged always do.  Ruth saw how it was, and relented, as the woman always does.  She ran her arm through David’s, and gave it an affectionate teasing little squeeze.

“You can’t help not knowing anything, can you, poor dear?” she said, with sweet laughter.  “Well, then, never mind.  We will try to find out together.  There are only three things that I really must know—­that I can’t possibly do without knowing.”

The smile faded.  She sat silently gazing across the wide, quiet river.

“Only three really very, very important things,” she presently went on.  “The first is this:  How may a girl tell what people call ‘true love’ from every other kind of love?  You see, dear, there are so many kinds of love, and they are all true, too.  When a girl like me has loved every one ever since she could remember—­because every one has always been so good and loving to her that she couldn’t help it—­she knows, of course, when another kind of love comes; but she doesn’t know whether it is truer than all the rest.  How can she tell?  That is one of the things I want to find out—­the first of the three really important things that I most wish to know,” checking it off on her small forefinger.