-the young doctor who has lately come and who is curing
the Cold Plague. The Sisters told me. They said that he and Father Orin
often visited the sick together and were already great friends. How tall
he is--even taller than Father Orin, and broader shouldered. I should
like to see his face. And how straight he sits in the saddle. You would
expect a man who holds himself so to carry a lance and tilt fearlessly
at everything that he thought was wrong."

She turned, quickly tossing the willow branches aside and laughing
gayly. "There now, that will set you off thinking of your knights again!
But you must not. Truly, you must not. For it is quite true, dear; you
are a dreamer, a poet. You do indeed belong to the Arcadian Hills. You
should be there now, playing a gentle shepherd's pipe and herding his
peaceful flocks. And instead--alas!"--she looked at him in perplexity
which was partly real and partly assumed--"instead you are here in this
awful wilderness, carrying a rifle longer and heavier than yourself, and
trying to pretend that you like to kill wild beasts, or can endure to
hurt any living thing."

David said nothing; there seemed to be no response for him to make. When
a well-grown youth of eighteen or thereabouts is spoken to by a girl
near his own age as he had just been spoken to by Ruth, he rarely finds
anything to say. No words could do justice to what he feels. And there
is nothing for him to do either, unless it be to take refuge in a
dignified silence which disdains the slightest notice of the offence.
This was what David resorted to, and, bending down, he calmly and
quietly raised his forgotten rifle from the ground to his shoulder. He
did it very slowly and impressively, however, in the hope that Ruth
might realize the fact that he had killed the buck whose huge horns made
the rifle's rest on his cabin walls. But she saw and realized only that
he was wounded, and instantly darted toward him like a swallow. She
caught his rigid rifle arm and clung to it, looking up in his set face.
Her blue eyes were already filling with tears while the smile was still
on her lips. That was Ruth's way; her smiles and tears were even closer
together than most women's are; she was nearly always quiveringly poised
between gayety and sadness; like a living sunbeam continually glancing
across life's shadows.

"What is it, David, dear?" she pleaded, with her sweet lips close to his
ear. "What foolish thing have I said? You must