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194 down at him from a half-dead silver birch. For here in the heart of a country which had impressed him as a land without a past he had stumbled across a homestead with the true patina of time upon it.

And here, he told himself, was surely a chance for some of that old walnut and mahogany for which, in the eyes of the native, he stood ready to pay romantic prices.

So closely did he inspect the red-brick manor-house that it was several minutes before he became conscious of the girl standing within ten paces of him. She stood there in a birdlike attitude of arrested movement, with her body pressed in close to the hedge, as though timorously anxious to escape his eye. And he realized, as he stared at her, how some unconsidered protective coloration was causing her to merge into the brocaded background of that ruinous old garden. For she wore a lilac-colored sunbonnet and a frock of flowered organdie, and her hands were incased in a pair of russet gauntlets which had plainly known better days. Conkling