nd the picture arrested him on the
point of going. As if she suspected the cause of his delay and
intended to break the charm, she removed the hat deftly and placed it
with her gloves beside her.

"I think a fire would be pleasant," she remarked, "though it is really
as warm as summer."

She had changed the picture only to improve it, for the suggestion of
wildness and freedom in her dark hair fitted more perfectly with the
spirit of the twilight woods. It may be that only a man can understand
the fascination that exists for men in just such a simple operation as
she had performed. The absolute femininity of it, the fumbling for the
hatpins, the deliberate and thoughtful reinserting of them afterward in
the discarded hat, where they can be found when needed, the invariable
smoothing back of the hair from brow and eyes,--all these things make
their peculiar appeal. It was this that caused Leigh to smile as he
turned away and went in search of fuel, whistling softly to himself.
Returning with his hat well filled with pine cones, he caught sight of
her face before she noted his approach, and was struck, as once before,
by her expression of immeasurable sadness. She sat, as at first,
embracing her knees with her hands, her nether lip drawn in as if she
would suppress a sigh, her eyes fixed upon the distance and shadowed by
something of the solemnity of the coming night.

As the light flames shot suddenly up from the heap of cones, their
brilliancy made the surrounding woods seem vast and dark, the more so
as the sun had now sunk behind the hill across the stream, filling the
woods in that quarter with a glow as from another fire. He fed the
flames thoughtfully with bits of broken branches, talking somewhat at
random about a camping trip in the Yosemite.

"Isn't it absurd," she said presently, "that we have gradually lowered
our voices till we are talking almost in whispers?"

"I mean to break the spell at once," he declared, and having made a
trumpet with his hand, he hallooed loudly toward the west. The result
was unexpected. A ghostly triple echo, which the lower tone of their
earlier conversation had failed to elicit, answered him from the
opposite shore. In broad daylight an echo will suggest mystery and a
bodiless, impish mocker, even to an unimaginative mind, but now the
effect was intensified tenfold by the silence and darkness that
enclosed them like a wall.

"You may laugh," she said, "but I don't w