s of the past. "You wonder--what?" he asked.

She flushed slightly at the thought that he might think her guilty of an
intrusive curiosity, but she could not stop now. She must know more.
Her craving intelligence demanded some explanation. "Jose," she said
doubtfully and almost involuntarily.

A smile of pure amusement rippled about his mouth. "Yes," he said,
"Jose. What about him?"

Speech came readily enough to her now. "You know what Jose is,"
accusingly. "You know the big reward that is offered for him, and yet
you keep him in your cabin and treat him almost like a brother."

"Quite like a brother," he said; "why not? Who would have the heart to
put Pan in prison? Do you think shutting Jose up behind bars would make
him any better? At any rate, he is safe to do no mischief here, and he
is happy. Would you want us to give him up?"

"I!" She looked at him in surprise and shook her head. "But then we are
different, my father and me. He likes bad company, and I guess I take
after him. But you, they call you Saint Harry, you are respectable."

"Not I," he said earnestly; "you must not accuse me of such things. Look
yonder at that long mountain trail, leading up to the peaks. There are
mile-stones in it. So it is in life. When we have stopped trying to make
people measure up to our standard we have passed one; when we have gone
beyond forgiveness and learned that there is never anything to forgive
we have passed another, and when we have ceased from all condemnation we
have progressed a little farther."

She made no response to this. In that sunwarmed silence the wind
whispered softly through the pines, a sound like the monotonous, musical
murmur of distant seas. "But you will forget all that," she said
suddenly. "You will go back to the world. I know."

He smiled invincibly. "How do you know?"

She tapped her breast lightly with her jewel-encrusted hand. "From
myself. Oh, how I have hated life since I came here, but now I love it
again, I want it." She threw wide her arms and smiled radiantly, but not
at him, rather at the vision of life her imagination conjured. "I want
to dance, dance, dance, I want to live."

"And you will dance for us here in the mountains before you go away?" he
asked, with interest. "Good dancing is very rare and very beautiful.
There are very few great dancers."

"Yes, only a few," she said briefly. He could not know that she was one
of them, of course, but nevertheless it piqued her v