Page:A Colonial Wooing.djvu/86

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A Colonial Wooing

nance plainly showed, and while he felt he must have some one to talk to, there was but one to whom he could talk, and she was not accessible; so he whistled for the dog, and petted him extravagantly when he came bounding up to him. Man and dog made there, as they stood beneath the almost leafless trees, a pretty picture. John's brown hair, dark skin, and keen gray eyes, that flashed at times beneath the straight brows that shaded them, were now lighted by the mellow light of a late November day, one of those dreamy days when a man of brains will indulge in a contemplative stroll and be the better for it. There is a hazy, perhaps even an indistinct outlook, but the light is the better for this when we want to conjure up pictures and people and recall loved scenes that linger in the memory; and John, to-day, was in a retrospective mood. He desired to live over again some recent events and to talk about them, but not to the trees or the uncertain birds or to himself. His neighbor's dog would answer by the gleam of intelligence in its nutty brown eyes, and then John could frame such replies as

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