My Love's an Arbutus,'" said Kenny demurely. He knew at once that he
must not step so far ahead again. She looked a little frightened. Kenny
instantly called her attention to a gap in the range of hills to the west.

"Like the Devil's Bit in Ireland," he said. "There the devil, poor lad,
bit a chunk out of a mountain and not liking the morsel over well,
treated it as you and I would treat a cherry pit."

Joan laughed.

"True." said Kenny, "every word of it. I myself have seen the chunk he
threw away. Tis the Rock of Cashel. He's been bitin' again over there,
I take it. To-morrow you and I will go down into the valley, seek the
unappetizin' rock he rejected and look it over."

"I think most likely," said Joan, "the farm's built on it."

And then the sound of the horn came over the water and Joan ran.

Kenny as usual cursed the horn.

With the valley filled with the first haze of twilight and the hills
still aglow, Kenny sat on the farm porch and brooded. He had not meant
to frighten her. The Arbutus gallantry he had considered strategic and
poetic. There was the baffling thing about her that kept him piqued.
She was always shy and elusive. Of convention she knew nothing at all;
yet like the shrine in the garret she kept herself apart and precious.
Always she seemed fluttering just ahead of him, like a will-of-the-wisp.
If he touched her hand ever so gently she drew it away. The caresses
most girls he had known would have understood and accepted as part of the
summer idyl, he knew, instinctively, would be evaded.

Ah! the truth of it was she was an incomprehensible torment of delight.
For she roamed the fields and woods with him gladly, lunched in glens
remote it seemed from everything but the call of that infernal horn,
yielded to the enthusiasm of his maddest moods, romped with him like a
kitten or a child--and kept miraculously the poise and reticence of a
woman. She talked freely of her brother; never of her uncle.

He was quick and impressionable, this gifted Irishman, with a trace of
the melancholy of his race and all of its cheer. Melancholy was the one
mood in which Joan did not seem to flutter just ahead. Always then she
followed, gentle, compassionate and shyly tender. He was quick to find
it out and wily enough to feign it when in reality his heart was as light
and buoyant as a feather.

Save for the call of the horn beneath the willow, the girl was as free to
come and go as an oriole