line of her lips softened. Almost before she realized it that morning,
she had relegated her anxiety over Garry Devereau and her astonishment
at the confession which she had beheld in Miriam's eyes to a rather
hazy background, and turned to those very thoughts against which she
had fought so fiercely throughout the night. She drifted into a
surprisingly unanalytical and most femininely inquisitive wonder
concerning a tall figure in blue flannel and corduroy. She suddenly
found herself pondering the very incidents which, a few hours before,
had set her small fists to clenching in a tide of incomprehensible
resentment--against herself or him she could not for the life of her
tell.

Mile after mile, the roan mare placidly choosing the pace, she rode
with one leg dangling over the pummel of the saddle, everything else
forgotten in that preoccupied endeavor to review each moment she had
shared with him. Again she felt his arm harden threateningly under her
startled clasp as a red-headed and very drunk river-man lurched out of
a doorway ahead of them; with breath softly audible between arched lips
she tried to recall the gentleness of his hands when he was refastening
her cloak beneath her rigidly upflung chin. And when the higher
morning sun found her far beyond the rolling pasture land, miles in the
heavy timber, she had dismounted, there where the highest loop in the
road commanded its breath-taking sweep of country, and was sitting
cross-legged upon the trunk of a fallen tree at the road edge.
Frowning a little over the vexing uncertainty of details, Barbara was
wondering just what their next meeting would be like; she had just
finished picturing his man's discomfort and self-consciousness and lack
of ease and, with a soberness so childish it would have dumbfounded her
had she given it thought, was nodding approvingly over a contemplation
of her own kind cordiality, when that very blue-shirted figure itself
rounded a near corner in the narrow lane between the trees. Stephen
O'Mara, in the flesh, appeared before her, astride Ragtime and leading
her roan, which, contentedly cropping the bush tops, had disappeared a
full quarter of an hour before.

The girl gasped at the suddenness of his coming; she half started to
rise before she remembered the instability of her perch, and then
crouched even lower than before when she saw that he was not yet aware
of her nearness. It was not at all like the encounter which she had