own between
them, her pretty nose plowing the wet snow-crust. Carl, speeding
beside her, his obedient skees exactly parallel, lifted her and
brushed the snow from her furs and her nose. She was laughing.

Falling, getting up, learning at last the zest of coasting and of
handling those gigantic skates on level stretches, she accompanied him
from hill to hill, through fences, skirting thickets, till they
reached a hollow at the heart of a farm where a brooklet led into
deeper woods. The afternoon was passing; the swarthy clouds marched
grimly from the east; but the low sun red-lettered the day. The
country-bred Carl showed her how thin sheets of ice formed on the bank
of the stream and jutted out like shelves in an elfin cupboard,
delicate and curious-edged as Venetian glass; and how, through an
opening in the ice, she could spy upon a secret world of clear water,
not dead from winter, but alive with piratical black bugs over sand of
exquisitely pale gray, like Lilliputian submarines in a fairy sea.

A rabbit hopped away among the trees beyond them, and Carl, following
its trail, read to her the forest hieroglyphics--tracks of rabbit and
chipmunk and crow, of field-mouse and house-cat, in the snow-paved
city of night animals with its edifices of twiggy underbrush.

The setting sun was overclouded, now; the air sharp; the grove
uneasily quiet. Branches, contracting in the returning cold, ticked
like a solemn clock of the woodland; and about them slunk the homeless
mysteries that, at twilight, revisit even the tiniest forest, to wail
of the perished wilderness.

"I know there's Indians sneaking along in there," she whispered, "and
wolves and outlaws; and maybe a Hudson Bay factor coming, in a red
Mackinaw coat."

"And maybe a mounted policeman and a lost girl."

"Saying which," remarked Ruth, "the brave young man undid his pack and
disclosed to the admiring eyes of the hungry lass--meaning me,
especially the 'hungry'--the wonders of his pack, which she had been
covertly eying amid all the perils of the afternoon."

Carl did not know it, but all his life he had been seeking a girl who
would, without apologetic explanation, begin a story with herself and
him for its characters. He instantly continued her tale:

"And from the pack the brave young hero, whose new Norfolk jacket she
admired such a lot--as I said, from the pack he pulled two clammy,
blue, hard-boiled eggs and a thermos bottle filled with tea into which