"No," he returned quickly; "I only run down here from San Francisco when
I can get a day off."

A day off! He was in some regular employment. But he continued: "And I
used to go to boarding-school near here, and know all these woods well."

He must be a native! How odd! She had not conceived that there might
be any other population here than the immigrants; perhaps that was what
made him so interesting and different from the others. "Then your father
and mother live here?" she said.

His frank face, incapable of disguise, changed suddenly. "No," he said
simply, but without any trace of awkwardness. Then after a slight
pause he laid his hand--she noticed it was white and well kept--on her
mustang's neck, and said, "If--if you care to trust yourself to me, I
could lead you and your horse down a trail into the valley that is at
least a third of the distance shorter. It would save you going back to
the regular road, and there are one or two lovely views that I could
show you. I should be so pleased, if it would not trouble you. There's a
steep place or two--but I think there's no danger."

"I shall not be afraid."

She smiled so graciously, and, as she fully believed, maternally, that
he looked at her the second time. To his first hurried impression of
her as an elegant and delicately nurtured woman--one of the class of
distinguished tourists that fashion was beginning to send thither--he
had now to add that she had a quantity of fine silken-spun light hair
gathered in a heavy braid beneath her gray hat; that her mouth was
very delicately lipped and beautifully sensitive; that her soft skin,
although just then touched with excitement, was a pale faded velvet, and
seemed to be worn with ennui rather than experience; that her eyes
were hidden behind a strip of gray veil whence only a faint glow was
discernible. To this must still be added a poetic fancy all his own
that, as she sat there, with the skirt of her gray habit falling from
her long bodiced waist over the mustang's fawn-colored flanks, and with
her slim gauntleted hands lightly swaying the reins, she looked like
Queen Guinevere in the forest. Not that he particularly fancied Queen
Guinevere, or that he at all imagined himself Launcelot, but it was
quite in keeping with the suggestion-haunted brain of John Milton
Harcourt, whom the astute reader has of course long since recognized.

Preceding her through the soft carpeted vault with a woodman's
instinct,--fo