cked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She
swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at her
throat as she struggled for breath.

"There--there!" she gasped at him voicelessly. "There," she whispered
through her white lips, "now will you let him go?"

And Denny Bolton had stood that afternoon in wondering silence, gazing
back into her twitching, distorted face without a word while the blood
oozed from the deep cuts in his cheeks and dripped noisily upon the
dry leaves. Once he turned and followed with his eyes the mad flight
of the rabbit through the underbrush; and then turned slowly back to
her.

"Why, he's gone already," he stated with a gentle gravity that was
almost ponderous. And with a deliberation which he meant more to
comfort than to conciliate: "I--I aimed to let him go, myself, right
from the first time you asked me--after a while!"

She cried over him that afternoon--cried not as he had known other
girls to cry, but with long noiseless gasps that shook her thin
shoulders terribly. Her eyes swam with great drops that hung from her
lashes and went rolling silently down her small face while she washed
out the cuts with one sleeve ruthlessly wrenched from her blouse and
soaked in the brook nearby.

But in almost the same breath while she crooned pityingly over him she
bade him--commanded him with a swift, fierce passionate vehemence--to
tell her that it did not hurt--did not hurt very much! And before she
would let him go that day she made him promise to come back--she
promised herself to set a light in the front window of the shabby
little cottage to tell him that she had found the plaster--that there
was enough left to close the cuts.

There had never been any spoken agreement between them, but since that
night, three years ago, Denny Bolton had learned to watch each week
end, just at dusk, for the signal to appear. From the first their very
loneliness had drawn them together--a childish, starved desire for
companionship; and as time passed they only clung the closer, each to
the other, as jealously fearful as a marooned man and woman might have
been of any harm which might come to the one and leave the other
utterly, desolately alone.

Winter and summer Denny Bolton went every Saturday night, close to
nightfall, and waited for her to come, except that now, in the last
few weeks since the first rumor of the Judge's big barn-raising and
masquerade had gone forth, no