moment
later, and peered out with the knowledge of long years from a thicket
of young banksians, and when he saw the two in the open, close in each
other's arms, and Peter hopping madly about them, he drew out a
handkerchief and wiped his eyes, and went back then for the axe which
he had dropped in the timber clump.

There was a great drumming in Jolly Roger's head, and for a time he
failed even to hear Peter yelping at their side, for all the world was
drowned in those moments by the breaking sobs in Nada's breath and the
wild thrill of her body in his arms; and he saw nothing but the
upturned face, crushed close against his breast, and the wide-open
eyes, and the lips to kiss. And even Nada's face he seemed to see
through a silvery mist, and he felt her arms strangely about his neck,
as if it was all half like a dream--a dream of the kind that had come
to him beside his campfire. It was a little cry from Nada that drove
the unreality away.

"Roger--you're--breaking me," she cried, gasping for her breath in his
arms, yet without giving up the clasp of her own arms about his neck in
the least; and at that he sensed the brutality of his strength, and
held her off a little, looking into her face.

Pride and happiness and the courage in his heart would have slunk away
could he have seen himself then, as Father John saw him, coming from
the edge of the bush, and as Nada saw him, held there at the end of his
arms. Since the day he had come with Peter to Cragg's Ridge the blade
of a razor had not touched his face, and his beard was like a brush,
and with it his hair unkempt and straggling; and his eyes were red from
sleeplessness and the haunting of that grim despair which had dogged
his footsteps.

But these things Nada did not see. Or, if she did, there must have been
something beautiful about them for her. For it was not a little girl,
but a woman who was standing there before Jolly Roger now--Nada grown
older, very much older it seemed to McKay, and taller, with her hair no
longer rioting free about her, but gathered up in a wonderful way on
the crown of her head. This change McKay discovered as she stood there,
and it swept upon him all in a moment, and with it the prick of
something swift and terrorizing inside him. She was not the little girl
of Cragg's Ridge. She was a _woman_. In a year had come this miracle of
change, and it frightened him, for such a creature as this that stood
before him now Jed Hawkins woul