Viola was just leaving her mother's gate the following afternoon when a man's voice, cordial, assured, and cultivated, startled her.
"Good-morning. Is this your home?"
She looked up to meet the smiling eyes of the stranger horseman. Again an indefinable charm of manner robbed his greeting of offence, and quite composedly she replied: "Yes, this is our home."
"What a view you have, and what music!" He indicated the river which ran white and broad over its pebbles, just below the walk. "I am enchanted with the place. I think you must love it very much."
Her face expressed a qualified assent. "Oh yes, but I get tired of it sometimes, especially in winter when we are all shut in with snow."
"Then you really are a year-round resident? I suppose my view is the tourist's view. I can't believe anybody lives here in winter. I hope you won't mind my introducing myself"--he handed her a card. "You made such a pretty picture up there beside the trail yesterday that I couldn't forbear speaking to you on a second meeting. I wanted to know whether you were real or just a fragment of sunset cloud."
The ease and candor of his manner, joined to the effect of the name on the card, fully reassured her, and she looked up with a smile. "Won't you come in and rest?"
"Thank you, I should like particularly to do so, I've been for a climb up that peak behind your cottage and I'm tired."
Her reserve quite melted, the girl led the way to the door where her mother stood in artless wonder.
"Mother, this is Dr. Serviss, of Corlear College."
"I'm glad to know you, sir," said Mrs. Lambert, with old-fashioned formality. "Won't you come in?"
"Thank you. It will be a pleasure."
"Are you a physician?" she asked, as she took his hat and stick.
"Oh, dear, no! Nothing so useful as that. I'm a doctor by brevet, as they say in the army." Then, as though acknowledging that his hostess was entitled to know a little more about her intrusive guest, he added: "I am a student of biology, Mrs. Lambert, and assistant to Dr. Weissmann, the head of the bacteriological department of Corlear Medical College. We study germs--microscopic 'bugs,'" he ended, with humorous glance at Viola. "What a charming bungalow you have here! Did you gather those wild flowers?"
Viola answered in the tone of a pupil to her master, "Yes, sir."
"But some of them grow high. You must be a mountaineer. Pardon my curiosity--it is inexcusable--but how long have you lived here?"
The mother looked at her daughter for confirmation. "Eight years."