Page:The leopard's spots - a romance of the white man's burden-1865-1900 (IA leopardsspotsrom00dixo).pdf/297

 life and love. Again Gaston and Sallie were jogging along the shady river road they had travelled on the first day she had taken him driving.

"Do you remember this road?" she asked.

"I'll never forget it. Along this road we hurried in the twilight to face your angry mother, and just one kiss smoothed her brow into a welcoming smile for me."

"Well, I'm going to risk greater trouble to-day, and take you a mile or two further up the river to the old mill site at the rapids. It's the most beautiful and romantic spot in the country. The river spreads out a quarter of a mile in width, and goes plunging and dashing down the rapids through thousands of projecting rocks, a mass of white foam as far as you can see. It's full of tiny green islands with ferns and rhododendron and wild grape vines, and their perfume sweetens the air for miles along the water. These little islands, some ten feet square, some an acre, are full of mocking-birds nesting there, though since the mills were burned during the war nobody has lived near. The songs of these birds seem tuned to the music of the river."

"It must be a glimpse of fairy-land!" he exclaimed.

"I know you will be thrilled with its romantic beauty. It's five miles from a house in any direction."

Gaston was silent. He made a resolution in his soul that he would never leave that spot until he knew his fate. His heart began to thump now like a sledge-hammer. He looked down furtively at her and tried to imagine how she would look and what she would say when he should startle her first with some word of tender endearment or the sound of her name he had said over and over a thousand times in his heart, and aloud when alone, but never dared to use without its prefix.

She saw his abstraction and divined intuitively the cur-