kiss them all like that?" Taking him
by the shoulders, she held him a little way from her, and gazed at him
from head to foot. Then drawing him again to her embrace, she said, "I
don't care, at least no woman has kissed you like that." Happy,
dazzled, and embarrassed, he was beginning to stammer the truthful
protestation that rose to his lips, but she stopped him: "No, don't
protest! say nothing! Let _me_ love _you_--that is all. It is enough."
He would have caught her in his arms again, but she drew back. "We are
near the road," she said quietly. "Come! you promised to show me where
you camped. Let us make the most of our holiday. In an hour I must
leave the woods."

"But I shall accompany you, dearest."

"No, I must go as I came--alone."

"But Nellie"--

"I tell you no," she said, with an almost harsh practical decision,
incompatible with her previous abandonment. "We might be seen
together."

"Well, suppose we are; we must be seen together eventually," he
remonstrated.

The young girl made an involuntary gesture of impatient negation, but
checked herself. "Don't let us talk of that now. Come, while I am here
under your own roof"--she pointed to the high interlaced boughs above
them--"you must be hospitable. Show me your home; tell me, isn't it a
little gloomy sometimes?"

"It never has been; I never thought it _would_ be until the moment you
leave it to-day."

She pressed his hand briefly and in a half-perfunctory way, as if her
vanity had accepted and dismissed the compliment. "Take me somewhere,"
she said inquisitively, "where you stay most; I do not seem to see you
_here_," she added, looking around her with a slight shiver. "It is so
big and so high. Have you no place where you eat and rest and sleep?"

"Except in the rainy season, I camp all over the place--at any spot
where I may have been shooting or collecting."

"Collecting?" queried Nellie.

"Yes; with the herbarium, you know."

"Yes," said Nellie dubiously. "But you told me once--the first time we
ever talked together," she added, looking in his eyes--"something about
your keeping your things like a squirrel in a tree. Could we not go
there? Is there not room for us to sit and talk without being
browbeaten and looked down upon by these supercilious trees?"

"It's too far away," said Low truthfully, but with a somewhat
pronounced emphasis, "much too far for you just now; and it lies on
another trail that enters the wood beyond. But come,