r enthralled. More seriously he added: "It's the blood
of your ancestors. It is just getting a chance to make itself heard. The
racket of Market Street drowns it out."

She nodded thoughtfully. They did full justice to their lunch, finished
with her purchases for dessert, quite as he had prophesied, and lazed
through the nooning hour. Gloria lay on a yielding mat of pine-needles,
her eyes grave as her spirit within her was grave, moved by influences
at once vague, restless, and tremendous. This was not her first day in
the woods, and yet she felt strangely that it was. He had spoken of her
"ancestors." She knew little of her mother's and her father's forbears;
she had never been greatly concerned with individuals whom she had never
known. In a way she had been led to think, by her own mother, however so
innocently, that she was "living them down." They had been of a ruder
race that had lived in a ruder day. In San Francisco, to Miss Gloria
Gaynor in a pretty new gown, one of a cluster of dainty girls, those
grandparents had seemed further away than the one step of removal
between them and her nearer blood. To-day they came near her, very near,
indeed, for the hour that she lay looking up at the sky. Not many words
passed between her and King; he sat, back to tree, and smoked his pipe
and was quite content with the silence.

She started out of a reverie to find King standing up, his body rigid as
he stood in the attitude of one who listens, his head a little to one
side, his eyes narrowed.

"Wait for me," he said. "I'll be back in just a minute."

She sat up and watched him. He went back to the sloping granite slab,
over it, down among the alders, and out of sight. For a moment she heard
him among the bushes; then as all sound made by him died away there was
only the purl of the creek and the eternal murmur of the pines. Now it
seemed to her more silent than before, even when King had sat wordlessly
near her. And yet, incongruously, whereas the silence was deepened by
utter solitude, the voices of running water and stirring trees rose
clearer, louder, more insistent. A falling pine-needle, striking all but
noiselessly at her side, made her turn swiftly.

Only now did she hear that other sound, which King had detected. It was
the thud of horses' hoofs; with it came men's voices faintly. King had
gone that way, Gloria stood up, smothered under a sense of aloneness
She resented his going; she was on the verge of calling