ked the words and
the moon and gypsies joyously foot-loose, and he again grew sympathetic
for Juliana's small-town plight. He felt a large pagan tolerance for
those warped souls pent in small towns.

After twenty minutes of this he faintly heard a call from Juliana, sent
after the children below her. He saw her stand to beckon commandingly
and watch to see if she were obeyed. Then she turned and came slowly
back up the path that would lead to the stile. Again Dave absently
murmured his verses. Juliana approached the stile, walking briskly now.
She was halted by surprising speech from this rather cheaply debonair
creature who looked so nearly like a gentleman and yet so plainly was
not.

"Wanted to be off with 'em, didn't you?" Dave was saying brightly; "off
and over the edge of the world, all foot-loose and free as wind, going
over strange roads and lying by night under the stars."

"What?" demanded Juliana sharply.

She studied the fellow's face for the first time. He was preening his
yellow moustache and flashing a challenge to her from half-shut eyes.

"Small-towners bound to feel it," he continued, unconscious of any
sharpness in Juliana's "What!" "They want to be off and over the edge of
things, but they don't dare--haven't the nerve. You'd like to, but you
don't dare. You know you don't!"

Juliana almost smiled. The fellow's face, as she paused beside him at
the stile, was set with sheer impudence, yet this was not wholly
unattractive. And amazingly he now broke into verse:

We, too, shall steal upon the spring
With amber sails flown wide;
Shall drop, some day, behind the moon,
Borne on a star-blue tide.

He indicated the present moon with flourishing grace as he named it.
Juliana did not gasp, but it might have been a gasp in one less than a
Whipple. But the troubadour was not to be daunted. Juliana didn't know
Dave Cowan as cities knew him.

Enchanted ports we, too, shall touch;
Cadiz or Cameroon;
Nor other pilot need beside
A magic wisp of moon.

Again he gracefully indicated our lunar satellite, and again Juliana
nearly gasped.

"Of course, you felt it all, watching those people. I don't blame you
for feeling wild."

Juliana lifted one of her stout tan boots toward the stile, and Dave
with doffed cap extended a hand to assist her through. Juliana, dazed
beyond a Whipple calm for almost the first time in her thirty years,
found her own hand perforce upo