. It's
three o'clock now. Let's go." He lifted her to her feet and stooped to
pick up her hat.

"Do you really mind going with me, Victor?" Elinor asked.

"Do I mind? I've been waiting two years for you to ask me to go." His
voice was very deep and there was a soft light in his brown eyes.

Elinor's pulse beat felt a thrill. A sudden sense of the sweetness of
the day and of a joy unlike any other joy of her life possessed her.

Down on the bridge they stopped to watch the sunlit waters of the Walnut
rippling below them.

"Are we the same two who crept up on this bridge, wet, and muddy and
tired, and scared one stormy October night eighteen months ago?" Elinor
asked.

"I've had no reincarnation that I know of," Vic replied.

"I have," Elinor declared, and Vic thought of Burgess.

Up the narrow hidden glen they made their way, clambering about broken
ledges, crossing and recrossing the little stream, hugging the dry
footing under overhanging rock shelves, laughing at missteps and
rejoicing in the springtime joy, until they came suddenly upon a grassy
open space, cliff-walled and hidden, even from the rest of the glen.
At the farther end was the low doorway-like entrance to the cave. The
song-birds were twittering in the trees above them, the waters of the
little stream gurgled at their feet, the woodsy odor of growing things
was in the air, and all the little glen was restful and quiet.

"Isn't it beautiful and romantic--and everything nice?" Elinor cried.
"I don't mind this sentence to hard service. It is worth it. Do you mind
the loss of time, Victor?"

"I counted it gain to be here with you, even in the storm and terror.
How can this be loss?" he answered her. His voice was low and musical.

Elinor looked up quickly. And quickly as the thing had come to Victor
Burleigh on the west bluff above the old Kickapoo Corral two Octobers
ago, so to Elinor Wream came the vision of what the love of such a man
would be to the woman who could win it.

"Do you really mean it, Victor? Was n't I a lump of lead? A dead weight
to your strength that night? You have never once spoken of it."

She looked up with shining eyes and put out her hand. What could he do
but keep it in his own for a moment, firm-held, as something he would
keep forever.

"I have never once forgotten it," he murmured.

The cave by daylight was as the lightning had shown it, a big chamber,
rock-walled, rock-floored, rock-roofed, in the side of the