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RV 100 Yet he had not so much the air of a person mum as of one musing, and turning over a question. Carron could see it ruminating in his eyes, and expressed in the fluctuating cloud of his pipe as they climbed the ascent among the pines, startling the blue wings of birds into flight among the branches. Noon was in the air, the languor of it. They dipped into a little depression, began another more gradual rise, and presently sighted the line of the hotel roof; a little higher, glimpses of windows came into view between the trunks of trees; and, last, a long white-washed covered passage, with a little round room at the end of it, extending from the back of the house. It projected into the pines like a promontory into the sea, and they, the incoming craft, voyaging toward it. Carron recognized this must be the scholar's study. A piazza was in front of it, evidently but the continuation of the broader one that clung all around the house. Three wooden steps led up to it. At the foot of these Rader paused. He leaned back against the rail and spoke as if no silence had intervened.

"It wouldn't have been like her to tell him," he said argumentatively. "She's too close-mouthed, and, besides—" he mused and puffed—"not that his knowing would matter any more than mine," he took up another sentence. "He's nothing of a rider.