ut if he DID hear he couldn't understand," returned the first voice. A
suppressed giggle followed.

Luckily, Elijah's natural and acquired habits of repression suited the
emergency. He did not move, although he felt the quick blood fly to his
face, and the voice of the first speaker had suffused him with a strange
and delicious anticipation. He restrained himself, though the words she
had naively dropped were filling him with new and tremulous suggestion.
He was motionless, even while he felt that the vague longing and
yearning which had possessed him hitherto was now mysteriously taking
some unknown form and action.

The murmuring ceased. The humble-bees' drone again became ascendant--a
sudden fear seized him. She was GOING; he should never see her! While he
had stood there a dolt and sluggard, she had satisfied her curiosity and
stolen away. With a sudden yielding to impulse, he darted quickly in
the direction where he had heard her voice. The thicket moved, parted,
crackled, and rustled, and then undulated thirty feet before him in a
long wave, as if from the passage of some lithe, invisible figure. But
at the same moment a little cry, half of alarm, half of laughter, broke
from his very feet, and a bent manzanito-bush, relaxed by frightened
fingers, flew back against his breast. Thrusting it hurriedly aside,
his stooping, eager face came almost in contact with the pink, flushed
cheeks and tangled curls of a woman's head. He was so near, her moist
and laughing eyes almost drowned his eager glance; her parted lips and
white teeth were so close to his that her quick breath took away his
own.

She had dropped on one knee, as her companion fled, expecting he would
overlook her as he passed, but his direct onset had extracted the
feminine outcry. Yet even then she did not seem greatly frightened.

"It's only a joke, sir," she said, coolly lifting herself to her feet by
grasping his arm. "I'm Mrs. Dall, the Indian agent's wife. They said you
wouldn't let anybody see you--and I determined I would. That's all!" She
stopped, threw back her tangled curls behind her ears, shook the briers
and thorns from her skirt, and added: "Well, I reckon you aren't afraid
of a woman, are you? So no harm's done. Good-by!"

She drew slightly back as if to retreat, but the elasticity of the
manzanito against which she was leaning threw her forward once more.
He again inhaled the perfume of her hair; he saw even the tiny freckles
that dark