"Did your father teach you to think like this?"
"Oh, dear no!" said Betty. "He doesn't like the little pretty things."
"It's odd," said Temple. "Look at those yellow roses all over that hideous villa."
"My step-father would only see the villa. Well, must we work to-day?"
"What would you like to do?"
"I should like to go to those big rocks--the Rochers des Demoiselles, aren't they?--and tie up the pony, and climb up, and sit in a black shadow and look out over the green tops of the trees. You see things when you're idle that you never see when you're working, even if you're trying to paint those very things."
So, by and by, the gray pony was unharnessed and tied to a tree in a cool, grassy place where he also could be happy, and the two others took the winding stony path.
A turn in the smooth-worn way brought them to a platform overhanging the precipice that fell a sheer thirty feet to the tops of the trees on the slope below. White, silvery sand carpeted the ledge, and on the sand the shadow of a leaning rock fell blue.
"Here" said Betty, and sank down. Her sketchbook scooped the sand with its cover. "Oh, I am hot!" She threw off her hat.
"You don't look it," said Temple, and pulled the big bottle of weak claret and water from the luncheon basket.
"Drink!" he said, offering the little glass when he had filled it.
Betty drank, in little sips.
"How extraordinarily nice it is to drink when you're thirsty," she said, "and how heavenly this shadow is."
A long silence. Temple filled and lighted a pipe. From a slope of dry grass a little below them came the dusty rattle of grasshoppers' talk.
"It is very good here," said Betty. "Oh, how glad I am I came away from Paris. Everything looks different here--I mean the things that look as if they mattered there don't matter here--and the things that didn't matter there--oh, here, they do!"
"Yes," said Temple, making little mounds of sand with the edge of his hand as he lay, "I never expected to have such days in this world as I've had here with you. We've grown to be very good friends here, haven't we?"
"We were very good friends in Paris," said Betty, remembering the letter that had announced his departure.