bout
down there in the alders, it took nearly all the imagination I
possessed to see two streaks of steel where there is nothing but
thicket now. But as for the bigness of it"--he laughed
deprecatingly--"it isn't so very big, you know. It's just a--a mean
sort of proposition."

Barbara leaned forward, delicate chin resting upon interlocked fingers.
She was not quite certain whether she had caught a thread of weariness
in those words.

"To me," she said, "to me it is colossal! Why, I thought the work at
Morrison seemed complicated and tangled enough, but there--there isn't
even a beginning or an ending here. There's nothing but woods and
water."

She pointed out across the valley toward a mound-like outline yellow
under the moon; pointed into the north and asked another question.

"Is that part of the embankment?" she wanted to know. "Is that the
direction in which Mr. Wickersham's timber lies?"

The man nodded.

"Just a few miles up through that notch," he told her. "That's the end
of the rail-bed which we have been building along the river-edge."

Her next words made him start and then try to cover that moment with a
readjustment of his long body.

"I'm going up there to-morrow. Mr. Wickersham has asked me to ride
with him, in the morning." She waited a moment or two. "That--that's
why I came out here to-night. We'll be going back to town the next day
or two, and I wanted to have a chance to bid you good-bye, before I
left Morrison for the winter."

He had known that she would not be likely to remain in the hills much
longer. He had realized that each day which he checked off, always
hopeful that the next might open the way for him to see her again, was
steadily bringing nearer the date of her departure. But he had not let
himself think that it would come so soon. There was no doubt this time
about the heaviness of his voice.

"I see," he said. "I see."

There came another long silence. Rising out of it, Barbara's voice
sounded very, very little.

"I've never known a sky in which the stars were so thick.
They're--they're like a field of buttercups. And have you ever seen
such an irrepressibly happy creature as Miriam was to-night. She was
radiant--positively shameless! Did you know that Garry knows----"

"I told him, myself," said Steve, simply.

The girl faced around in her surprise.

"You?"

"Most certainly! Why not?" His voice was not quite so unenthusiastic
now. "It's one