terated, serenely, "some day! And she'll know
then--some day I'll tell her--that I was with her tonight."

She had forgotten the rain. It was coming down heavily, and it was
dark, too--very, very dark. She stopped a while, as long as she dared,
and waited with the rain beating cold upon her uncovered head and bare
throat until her eyes saw the path a little more clearly. It took her
a long time to feel her way forward that night. And even when she came
within sight of Denny's lantern, even when she was near enough to see
him through the thicket ahead of her, in the little patch of light,
she had not decided what she meant to do.

But with that first glimpse of him squatting there in the small
cleared space it came to her what her course should be. She
realized that if it was an impossibility for her to go to him, she
could at least let him know she had been there--let him know that he
had not been entirely alone while he waited. She even smiled to
herself--smiled with wistful, half-sad, elfen tenderness as she, too,
huddled down without a sound, there in the wet bushes opposite him,
and decided how she would tell him.

Denny Bolton never quite knew how long he waited in the rain before he
was certain that there was no use waiting longer. More than half the
night had dragged by when he reached finally into the pockets of his
coat and searched for a scrap of paper. Watching from her place in the
thicket near him, she recognized the small white card which he
discovered--she even reached out one hand instinctively for her
invitation from the Judge, which she had told him had never arrived
and for which she had hunted in vain throughout the following days.

With an unaccountable gladness because he knew straining at her
throat, she watched him draw the lantern nearer and read again the
words it bore before he turned it over and wrote, laboriously, with
the thick pencil that he used to check logs back in the hills, some
message across its back.

It was a message to her, she knew; and she knew, too, that he was
going now. Deliberately she reached out then and found a rotten branch
beside her. Young Denny's head shot up as it cracked between her
hands--shot swiftly erect while he stared hard at that wall of
darkness which hid her. And swiftly as she fled, like some noiseless
night creature of the woods, his sudden, plunging rush almost
discovered her.

Back in the safety of the blackness she stood and saw him bend over