ilence after the first kiss!

"What was your decision that afternoon on the Rock, Ben? You never told
me." She asked presently, in a lighter tone, "Would you have taken me
in spite of my family?"

He laughed with faint mischief.

"Before I tell you, I want to ask _you_ something," he said in his
turn. "Supposing I had decided that, even though I loved you, I must
give you up because of my duty to my family--suppose that, I say--what
would _you_ have done? Would your love for me have been so strong that
you would have finally confessed to me the fact that the Lawtons were
not your parents? Or would you have thrown me over entirely because you
thought I did not love you enough to take you for yourself?"

She considered the matter seriously for some little time.

"Ben, I don't know," she confessed at last frankly. "I can't tell."

"No more can I, sweetheart. I hadn't decided."

She puckered her brows in the darkness with genuine distress. Women
worry more than men over past intangibilities. He smiled comfortably to
himself, for in his grasp he held, unresisting, the dearest little hand
in the world. Outside, the ever-charming, ever-mysterious night of the
Hills was stealing here and there in sighs and silences. From the
darkness came the high sweet tenor of Bert Leslie's voice in the words
of a song:

"A Sailor to the Sea, a Hunter to the Pines,
And Sea and Pines alike to joy the Rover,
The Wood-smells to the nostrils of the Lover of the Trail,
And Hearts to Hearts the whole World over!"

Through and through the words of the song, like a fine silver wire
through richer cloth of gold, twined the long-drawn, tremulous notes
of the white-throated sparrow, the nightingale of the North.

"The dear old Hills," he murmured tenderly. "We must come back to them
often, sweetheart."

"I wish, I _wish_ I knew!" she cried, holding his hand tighter.

"Knew what?" he asked, surprised.

"What you'd have done, and what I'd have done!"

"Well," he replied, with a happy sigh, "I know what I'm _going_ to do,
and that's quite enough for me."

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's The Claim Jumpers, by Stewart Edward White

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