sprang shivering to one side; but Dorothy only said, quite composedly:
"I suppose you were blasting up there. Will there be another?"

"No; but how did you know it was I?"

"Why, I knew all about it, of course. Fanny told me, and Mrs. Dick
Dayton wrote home, and,--well, I knew about it a great deal better than
anybody else!"

"And you knew I was up here?"

"Of course I did! Why, else, should I have come up at daybreak?"

"But, Dorothy," Wakefield persisted, determined to make a clean breast
of it at the outset. "Did you know I had made a fizzle of everything out
here?"

"I knew you had lost your money," she replied, with an air of misprizing
such sordid considerations. "And Fanny told me you were going to
California, and,--I just thought I would come out with the Dennimans!"
she added irrelevantly.

He was walking beside her horse up the broad clean road he had once
taken such pride in;--ages ago he thought it must have been. On either
hand, the solemn cliffs, familiars of the past three months, stood
decked with gleaming bits of color; the brook went careering in their
shadow, calling and crooning its little tale. What was that over yonder
under the big pine-tree? Only a pair of bright eyes, that twinkled
curiously, then vanished in a whisking bit of fur! On a sudden he had
become estranged and disassociated from these intimate surroundings,
these sights and sounds which had so long been his companions. What had
they to do with Dorothy!

She was telling him of her journey out and of the friends she was
travelling with. She would have given him the home news, but, "Don't
talk about anybody but yourself, Dorothy," he said. "That's all that I
care about!"

At last they stood fronting the big boulder, whose side had been blasted
off. Dorothy looked at the fragments of stone strewing the road, and at
the massive granite surface, now withdrawn among the pine-trees. One
huge branch, broken by a flying rock, hung down across its face. The
whole scene told of the play of tremendous forces, and Wakefield's was
the hand that had controlled and directed them. Obedient to long habit,
he stooped, and lifting a good-sized fragment, sent it crashing down the
bank into the brook.

"How strong you are, Harry!" she said.

There was something in the way she said it, that made him feel that he
must break the spell, then and there, or he should be playing the
mischief with his own peace of mind. Yet he was conscious of a str