She put out her hand. He took it--how soft and small and cold! The
seconds were throbbing hours; he couldn't release it, at once. The
little fingers grew warmer--warmer in his palm--their very pulsations
seemed throbbing with his. Suddenly he dropped her hand.

"Good night," he said quickly.

He remembered he was nothing to her--that they would soon part for ever.

"Good night," she answered softly.

Then, silence.

CHAPTER XXIV

AN EXPLANATION

Morn came. They had heard or seen nothing of the prince and his men. Mr.
Heatherbloom walked back for a cold plunge in a stream that had
whispered not far from their camping spot throughout the night. He and
Betty Dalrymple breakfasted together on an old log; it wasn't much of a
meal--a few crackers and crumbs that were left--but neither appeared to
mind the meagerness of the fare. With much gaiety (the dawn seemed to
have brought with it a special allegrezza of its own) she insisted upon
a fair and equitable division of their scanty store, even to the
apportioning of the crumbs into two equal piles. Then, prodigal-handed
for a castaway who knew not where her next meal might come from, she
tossed a bit or two to the birds, and was rewarded by a song.

All this seemed very wonderful to Mr. Heatherbloom; there had never
before been such a breakfast; compared to it, the _dejeuner a la
fourchette_ of a Durand or a Foyot was as starvation fare. It was
surprising how beautiful the dark places of the night before looked now;
daylight metamorphosed the spot into a sylvan fairyland. Mr.
Heatherbloom could have lingered there indefinitely. The soft moss wooed
him, somewhat aweary with world contact; she filled his eyes. The faint
shadowy lines beneath hers which he had noted at the dawn had now
vanished; the same sun-god that ordered the forest flowers to lift their
gay heads commanded the rosebuds to unfold their bright petals on her
cheeks. Her lips were as red berries; the cobwebs, behind, alight with
sunshine, gleamed no more than the tossed golden hair. She had striven
as best she might with the last, not entirely to her own satisfaction
but completely to Mr. Heatherbloom's. His untutored masculine sense
rather gloried in the unconventionally of a superfluous tangle or two;
he found her most charming with a few rents in her gown from branch or
brier. They seemed to establish a new bond of camaraderie, to make
blithe appeal to his nomadic soul. It was as if fate had