an
expression as she could in the face of her very real relief at the news
of Garry's safety.

"I'm sorry," she murmured humbly. "I'm sorry to--disappoint you. But,
you see, I didn't know----"

She laughed at him. Her lips curled, petal-like, in a gurgling peal of
enjoyment at his shame-faced grin.

"I found your horse rolling," he explained, and his gravity was dogged
in the face of her brightness. "How I knew it was yours I don't know,
but I did just the same. I thought she had thrown you; I'd already
made up my mind, if there was one scratch on your body, to take that
mare's head between my hands and break her neck! You see, I believed I
knew already just what it would mean to me if anything ever happened to
you. But it's a lot different imagining the world without
you--and--and facing the actual possibility of it. Was I--fairly
tragic?"

And now it was his turn to laugh over her pink-faced disconcernment.
Most decidedly it was not the sort of an encounter which she had been
contemplating a moment earlier. There was no discomfort in that big,
loose-limbed body. She had imagined him as just a little moody and
sad-eyed, at least. And now she realized that she had never seen the
latter so easy to read as they were at that minute. Gray as the
shadowed silver thread of the river far below in the valley, they
glowed with a great gladness for her safety, and far, far more than
just that. The alarming cheerfulness of his gaze was too confusing to
sustain.

"Of course you've found Garry," she hastened to swing the conversation
to a less personal quarter. "Is he--will you tell me about it, please?"

One small, gauntleted hand made an almost imperceptible gesture toward
the unoccupied space beside her on the fallen tree. But he chose the
ground at her feet. And after he had disposed his long length to his
liking he answered her hurried question--answered it with an amiably
lazy deliberation that promised a sure return to a topic of his own
choosing, in his own good time.

"No," he stated, and there was something lugubrious in the baldness of
the statement. "He found me. And it was the biggest stroke of luck
that he did. I grow more and more lucky this morning, wouldn't you say
so?"

The question was quite innocently direct. No, decidedly he was not
discomfited--not ill at ease at all! Apparently he found it much
easier to look at her than at any of the points of interest in the
landscape toward