now, good-bye. She
will never forgive you if you damage her new dress."

She spoke with a half-mocking and wholly bewitching air, for when Grace
unbent she did it charmingly, holding out a shapely hand, while the light
sparkled among the glossy clusters above her forehead. Grace's hair might
have been intended for a net in which to catch stray sunshine. Then while
I prepared to take up the challenge the slender fingers tightened on my
own.

"What was that?" she asked with a start, for a wild shrill cry rang
suddenly out of the stillness, and the hillside returned the sound in a
doleful wailing before it died away.

"Only a loon, a water-bird!" I said, though the cry had also startled me.

Grace shivered as she answered: "I have never heard it before, and it
sounded so unearthly--almost like a warning of some evil. But it is
growing late, and you have far to go. I shall expect you at the
crossing."

She turned back toward the house, and I laughed at my momentary confusion
as I rode on through the deepening shadow, for though it is strangely
mournful the loon's shrill call was nothing unusual in that land. Still,
mere coincidence as it was, remembering Grace's shiver it troubled me, and
I should have been more uneasy had I known how we were to keep that
fateful tryst.

It was a glorious morning when, with a package strapped to the saddle, I
rode down between the pine trunks to the crossing. The river flashed like
burnished silver below, and the sunlight made colored haloes in the filmy
spray that drifted about the black mouth of the canyon, while rising and
falling in thunderous cadence the voice of many waters rang forth from its
gloomy depths. The package was a heavy one, for there were many domestic
sundries as well as yards of dry-goods packed within it, and Harry assured
me it had taken him a whole day to procure them, adding that he was
doubtful even then whether he had satisfactorily filled the bill.

I had loitered some time on the hillside until I could see the party
winding down the opposite slope. Then the forest hid them, and it appeared
that, perhaps because the waters were high, they were not going straight
to the usual ford, but intended first to send the ladies across in a canoe
which lay lower down near a slacker portion of the rapid stream. The slope
on my own side was steep, but, picking my way cautiously, I was not far
above the river, which boiled in a succession of white-ridged rapids, when