I dislike to talk about the sad future, and I wonder men at the North are so blind." He fell again to mere musings, a self-absorbed man, while John, attracted by a squirrel's gambols and used to the rector's long silences, wandered near by among the pines, with a vagabond mind on this or that, and watching the alert little acrobat of the forest.

As he moved about, he recalled his first walks to the cabin with Leila and the wild thing he had said one day--and her reply.

One ages fast, at seventeen, and now he wondered if he had been quite wise, and with the wisdom and authority of a year and a half of mental growth punished his foolish boy-past with severity of reproach.

He had failed for a time to hear, or at least to hear with attention, the low-voiced soliloquies in which Mr.Rivers sometimes indulged.

McGregor, an observant man, said that Rivers's mind jumped from thought to thought, and that his talk had at times no connective tissue and was hard to follow.
Now he spoke louder.