r. Before he made his cigarette she found herself
answering his questions, telling about her life during his absence.

As she talked she saw his face only now and then when he turned a
little to laugh up at her over some trifle that amused him. The story
of this year of her life as she told it was a simple, homely little
tale, a quiet pastoral of happy content. It had to do largely with
herself and her work, with her failures and successes. But she
mentioned both Garth and Sledge Hume.

"Hume?" said Shandon, looking up quickly, this time with no laughter in
his eyes. "Have you seen much of that man, Wanda?"

"A good deal. He and father and Garth seem to have some kind of
business together. Why?"

"Because I don't like him," he told her emphatically. "I don't like to
have you know a man like that."

She did not mention Hume again. She admitted frankly that she herself
disliked the man although she had tried to think well of him because he
was a friend of her father. Running on with the account of her winter
adventures, and laughing at the memory of an incident that had been
serious enough at the time, she told him how she had imperilled her
life in heedless pursuit of the snow-shoe rabbit. Her mood, gay for
the moment, was the sort to make light of things which had merely cast
a shadow and gone; it was as though from the very presence of Wayne she
had accepted his theory of life, the ability to live keenly, richly in
the present, to be oblivious with sealed eyes to the future, careless
with deaf ears to the mutterings of the past. She was talking freely,
spontaneously, laughing from the very joy of life and the morning and
another joy which she did not analyse, looking down at the sunlight
caught flaring in his hair. And he, vastly contented, listened and
laughed with her.

Then, in the midst of the recital of her last winter's mishap which she
strove to make as unimportant as she now considered it, she looked down
at Wayne Shandon and suddenly broke off in the middle of a word. He
had dropped his cigarette, the hand that she could see had shut tight
into a whitened fist, the colour of a second ago had seeped out of his
bronzed cheek. As she stopped, wondering, he sprang to his feet and
towered over her.

"Wanda!" he cried, and his voice was as unfamiliar in her ears as the
view of his drawn face in her eyes.

"Wayne!" she said curiously, staring at him, startled and a little
afraid of she knew n