Of convention she knew nothing at all; yet like the shrine in the garret she kept herself apart and precious.
Always she seemed fluttering just ahead of him, like a will-of-the-wisp.
If he touched her hand ever so gently she drew it away.

The caresses most girls he had known would have understood and accepted as part of the summer idyl, he knew, instinctively, would be evaded.
Ah! the truth of it was she was an incomprehensible torment of delight.
For she roamed the fields and woods with him gladly, lunched in glens remote it seemed from everything but the call of that infernal horn, yielded to the enthusiasm of his maddest moods, romped with him like a kitten or a child--and kept miraculously the poise and reticence of a woman.

She talked freely of her brother; never of her uncle.
He was quick and impressionable, this gifted Irishman, with a trace of the melancholy of his race and all of its cheer.

Melancholy was the one mood in which Joan did not seem to flutter just ahead.

Always then she followed, gentle, compassionate and shyly tender.