-"

"I am trying to save myself--I am trying." She turned and looked off
through the forest, a straight, slender shape in the moving shadows of
the leaves.

"But if he could really help you--if you truly believe it, dear, I--I
don't know whether you might not venture--now----"

"No, dear." She slowly closed her eyes, remained motionless for a
moment, drew a deep, long breath, and looked up through the sunlit
branches overhead.

"I've got to be fair to him," she said aloud to herself; "I must give
myself to him as I ought to be, or not at all.... That is settled."

She turned to Kathleen and took her hand:

"Come on, fellow-pilgrim," she said with an effort to smile. "My
cowardice is over for the present."

A few steps forward they sighted Scott coming back. He was unusually red
in the face and rather excited, and he flourished a stick.

"Of all the infernal impudence!" he said. "What do you think has
happened to me? I saw a wild boar back there--not a very big one--and he
came out into the trail ahead, and I kept straight on, thinking he'd
hear me and run. And I'm blessed if the brute didn't whirl around and
roughen up, and clatter his tusks until I actually had to come to a
halt!"

"I don't want to walk in these woods any more," said Kathleen with
sudden conviction. "Please come home, all of us."

"Nonsense," he said. "I won't stand for being hustled out of my own
woods. Give me that rifle, Geraldine."

"I certainly will not," she said, smiling.

"What! Why not?"

"Because it rather looks as though I'm about to win my bet with you,"
observed Geraldine. "Please show me your boar, Scott." And she threw a
cartridge into the magazine and started forward.

"Don't let her!" pleaded Kathleen. "Scott, it's ridiculous to let that
child do such silly things----"

"Then stop her if you can," said Scott gloomily, following his sister.
"I don't know anything about wild boar, but I suppose straight shooting
will take care of them, and Sis can do that if she keeps her nerve."

Geraldine, hastening ahead, rifle poised, scanned the woods with the
palpitating curiosity of an amateur. Eyes and ears alert, she kept
mechanically reassuring herself that the thing to do was to shoot
straight and keep cool, and to keep on shooting whichever way the boar
might take it into his porcine head to run.

Scott hastened forward to her side:

"Here's the place," he said, looking about him. "He's concluded to make
off, you see.