I knew it!" she cried, beginning to fasten on her hat with
trembling fingers. "I had felt for some time that we were not alone."

"It was only the keeper," he assured her, "or some tramp, attracted by
the firelight and thinking he had stumbled upon the camp of one of his
pals. Let's leave him the rest of the grapes, to show that we bear him
no ill-will for the shock he has given us. I'll just scrape a ring
about the fire to keep it from spreading."

"This is my last picnic," she declared, "for this year at least. I
couldn't come here again after that fright."

"Perhaps it's just as well I happened along," he remarked. "That
fellow may have been lurking about the woods all the afternoon, hoping
to pick up something from late visitors like ourselves."

A moment later he regretted his ill-considered words, for at the
thought of the peril she might have been in, she rose to her feet with
an evident return of her panic. Without waiting to put on her gloves,
she thrust them into his hands with an impulsive movement, almost
childlike in its unconscious betrayal of emotion. He put the gloves in
his pocket and took her hand to lead her down the slope. "It's
slippery here," he explained. But there was no need to apologize for
what she by no means considered a liberty. Indeed, though he was
conscious of nothing so much as of her hand in his, he was aware that
she felt in his own merely a needed support. As she leaned upon him in
the descent, he divined that her fear increased, instead of
diminishing, with their progress into the circumjacent darkness, as if
the act of flight intensified an appreciation of the original cause.
He strove to dispel the emotion his own words had done so much to
arouse, not without a guilty self-congratulation that his
thoughtlessness had driven her to his protection. Feeling his way
thus, step by step, he presently saw before his feet, as in a dream,
the dim reflection of a star; and then the stream grew upon his vision,
like a strip of fallen sky.

At that moment her foot slipped on the smooth pine needles, and with a
smothered cry she seemed almost to swoon into his arms at the very
margin of the water. Instinctively he held her close, her heart
beating wildly against his own. A fragrance sweeter than the fragrance
of the woods pervaded his senses, and he felt her hair brush against
his cheek. Then she stood released, having recovered herself with a
swift impulse, like a wild crea