He gave her a funny embarrassed glance:  “Yes; I brought a sort of a book.”

“Then I’m all ready to be read to, thank you. . . .  Please steady me while I try to stand up on this log—­one hand will do—­”

Scarcely in contact with him she crossed the log, sprang blithely to the ground, and, lifting the hem of her summer gown an inch or two, picked her way toward the bank above.

“We can see Nina when she signals us from the lawn to come to luncheon,” she said, gazing out across the upland toward the silvery tinted hillside where Silverside stood, every pane glittering with the white eastern sunlight.

In the dry, sweet grass she found a place for a nest, and settled into it, head prone on a heap of scented bay leaves, elbows skyward, and fingers linked across her chin.  One foot was hidden, the knee, doubled, making a tent of her white skirt, from an edge of which a russet shoe projected, revealing the contour of a slim ankle.

“What book did you bring?” she asked dreamily.

He turned red:  “It’s—­it’s just a chapter from a little book I’m trying to write—­a—­a sort of suggestion for the establishment of native regiments in the Philippines.  I thought, perhaps, you might not mind listening—­”

Her delighted surprise and quick cordiality quite overwhelmed him, so, sitting flat on the grass, hat off and the hill wind furrowing his bright crisp hair, he began, naively, like a schoolboy; and Eileen lay watching him, touched and amused at his eager interest in reading aloud to her this mass of co-ordinated fact and detail.

There was, in her, one quality to which he had never appealed in vain—­her loyalty.  Confident of that, and of her intelligence, he wasted no words in preliminary explanation, but began at once his argument in favour of a native military establishment erected on the general lines of the British organisation in India.

He wrote simply and without self-consciousness; loyalty aroused her interest, intelligence sustained it; and when the end came, it came too quickly for her, and she said so frankly, which delighted him.

At her invitation he outlined for her the succeeding chapters with terse military accuracy; and what she liked best and best understood was avoidance of that false modesty which condescends, turning technicality into pabulum.

Lying there in the fragrant verdure, blue eyes skyward or slanting sideways to watch his face, she listened, answered, questioned, or responded by turns; until their voices grew lazy and the light reaction from things serious awakened the gaiety always latent when they were together.

“Proceed,” she smiled; “Arma virumque—­a noble theme, Captain Selwyn.  Sing on!”

He shook his head, quoting from “The Dedication”: 

   “Arms and the Man! 

A noble theme I ween! 
Alas!  I cannot sing of these, Eileen;
Only of maids and men and meadow-grass,
Of sea and tree and woodlands where I pass—­
Nothing but these I know, Eileen—­alas!