e we can hurry."

But it seemed to her brother that the good stretches were rather fewer
and shorter than the others, for the sun was overhead when they pulled
up their horses, steaming and ready enough to halt, in a small clearing
in the midst of a thick bit of forest. The timber was for the main part
of soft woods, poplar, yellow and black, cottonwood, and further up
among hills spruce and red pine. In the centre of the clearing stood a
rough log cabin with a wide porch running around two sides. Upon this
porch a young girl was to be seen busy over a cook stove. At the noise
of the approaching horses the girl turned from her work and looked
across the clearing at them.

"Heavens above! who is that, Sybil?" gasped her brother.

Mrs. Waring-Gaunt gave a delighted little cry. "Oh, my dear, you are
really back." In a moment she was off her horse and rushing toward the
girl with her arms outstretched. "Kathleen, darling! Is it you? And you
have really grown, I believe! Or is it your hair? Come let me introduce
you to my brother."

Jack Romayne was a young man with thirty years of experience of the
normal life of the well-born Englishman, during which time he had often
known what it was to have his senses stirred and his pulses quickened by
the sight of one of England's fair women, than whom none of fresher and
fairer beauty are to be found in all the world; yet never had he found
himself anything but master of his speech and behaviour. But to-day,
when, in obedience to his sister's call, he moved across the little
clearing toward the girl standing at her side, he seemed to lose
consciousness of himself and control of his powers of action. He was
instead faintly conscious that a girl of tall and slender grace, with
an aura of golden hair about a face lovelier than he had ever known, was
looking at him out of eyes as blue as the prairie crocus and as shy
and sweet, that she laid her hand in his as if giving him something of
herself, that holding her hand how long he knew not, he found himself
gazing through those eyes of translucent blue into a soul of unstained
purity as one might gaze into a shrine, and that he continued gazing
until the blue eyes clouded and the fair face flushed crimson, that
then, without a word, he turned from her, thrilling with a new gladness
which seemed to fill not only his soul but the whole world as well.
When he came to himself he found his trembling fingers fumbling with the
bridle of his h