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
brow-beaten 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, I will show you a spring known
only to myself, the wood ducks, and the squirrels. I discovered it the
first day I saw you, and gav