He brought Glani to a halt. They had left the sight of the meadow, though they could still hear the snorting of the oxen at their labor¹, a distant sound. Here, on one side of the road, the forest tumbled back from a swale of ground across which a tiny stream leaped and flashed with crooked² speed, and the ground seemed littered with bright gold, so closely were the yellow wild flowers packed.  
"Two days ago," said David, "they were only buds. See them now!"
 
He slipped from his horse and, stooping, rose again in a moment with his hands full of the yellow blossoms.
 
"They have a fragrance³ that makes them seem far away," he said. "See!"
 
He tossed the flowers at her; the wind caught them and spangled her hair and her clothes with them, and she breathed a rare perfume. David fell to clapping his hands and laughing like a child at the picture she made. She had never liked him so well as she did at this moment. She had never pitied him as she did now; she was not wise enough to shrink from that emotion.
 
"It was made for you—this place."
 
And before she could move to defend herself he had raised her strongly, lightly from the saddle, and placed her on the knoll⁴ in the thickest of the flowers. He stood back to view his work, nodding his satisfaction, and she, looking up at him, felt the old sense of helplessness sweep over her. Every now and then David Eden overwhelmed her like an inescapable destiny; there was something foredoomed about the valley and about him.
 
"I knew you would look like this," he was saying. "How do men make a jewel seem more beautiful? They set it in gold! And so with you, Ruth. Your hair against the gold is darker and richer and more like piles and coils of shadow. Your face against the gold is the transparent⁵ white, with a bloom in it. Your hands are half lost in the softness of that gold. And to think that is a picture you can never see! But I forget."
 
His face grew dark.
 
"Here I have stumbled again, and yet I started with strong vows⁶ and resolves. My brother Benjamin warned me!"
 
It shocked her for a reason she could not analyze⁷ to hear the big man call Connor his brother. Connor, the gambler, the schemer! And here was David Eden with the green of the trees behind, his feet in the golden wild flowers, and the blue sky behind his head. Brother to Ben Connor?
 
"And how did he warn you?" she asked.
 
"That I must not talk to you of yourself, because, he said, it shames you. Is that true?"
 
"I suppose it is," she murmured. Yet she was a little indignant because Connor had presumed to interfere⁸. She knew he could only have done it to save her from embarrassment⁹, but she rebelled at the thought of Connor as her conversational¹⁰ guardian¹¹.
 
Put a guard over David of Eden, and what would he be? Just like a score of callow youths whom she had known, scattering¹² foolish commonplaces, trying to make their dull eyes tell her flattering things which they had not brains enough to put into words.
 
"I am sorry," said David, sighing. "It is hard to stand here and see you, and not talk of what I see. When the sun rises the birds sing in the trees; when I see you words come up to my teeth."
 
He made a grimace¹³. "Well, I'll shut them in. Have I been very wrong in my talk to you?"
 
"I think you haven't talked to many women," said Ruth. "And—most men do not talk as you do."
 
"Most men are fools," answered the egoist. "What I say to you is the truth, but if the truth offends you I shall talk of other things."
 
He threw himself on the ground sullenly¹⁴. "Of what shall I talk?"
 
"Of nothing, perhaps. Listen!"
 
For the great quiet of the valley was falling on her, and the distances over which her eyes reached filled her with the delightful¹⁵ sense of silence. There were deep blue mountains piled against the paler sky; down the slope and through the trees the river was untarnished, solid, silver; in the boughs¹⁷ behind her the wind whispered and then stopped to listen likewise. There was a faint ache in her heart at the thought that she had not known such things all her life. She knew then what gave the face of David of Eden its solemnity. She leaned a little toward him. "Now tell me about yourself. What you have done."
 
"Of anything but that."
 
"Why not?"
 
"No more than I want you to tell me about yourself and what you have done. What you feel, what you think from time to time, I wish to know; I am very happy to know. I fit in those bits of you to the picture I have made."
 
Once more the egoist was talking!
 
"But to have you tell me of what you have done—that is not pleasant. I do not wish to know that you have talked to other men and smiled on them. I do not wish to know of a single happy day you spent before you came to the Garden of Eden. But I shall tell you of the four men who are my masters if you wish."
 
"Tell me of them if you will."
 
"Very well. John was the beginning. He died before I came. Of the others Matthew was my chief friend. He was very old and thin. His wrist was smaller than yours, almost. His hair was a white mist. In the evening there seemed to be a pale moonshine around his face.
 
"He was very small and old—so old that sometimes I thought he would dry up or dissolve and disappear. Toward the last, before God called him, Matthew grew weak, and his voice was faint, yet it was never sharp or shaken. Also, until the very end his eyes were young, for his heart was young.
 
"That was Matthew. He was like you. He liked the silence. 'Listen,' he would say. 'The great stillness is the voice; God is speaking.' Then he would raise one thin finger and we caught our breath and listened.
 
"Do you see him?"
 
"I see him, and I wish that I had known him."
 
"Of the others, Luke was taller than I. He had yellow hair as long and as coarse as the mane of a yellow horse. When he rode around the lake we could hear him coming for a great distance by his singing, for his voice was as strong as the neigh of Glani. I have only to close my eyes, and I can hear that singing of Luke from beside the lake. Ah, he was a huge man! The horses sweated under him.
 
"His beard was long; it came to the middle of his belly<............