ifted them and their
feet were no longer on the earth.

"But--but--" stammered the boy, moistening his lips, "you were singing
and laughing with Jimmy Hancock and the rest ten minutes ago, and now--"

The girl's delicately rounded chin came up in the tilt of pride.

"Do you think I'd show them how I felt?" she demanded. "Do you think
I'd tell anybody--except you."

Stuart Farquaharson had a sensation of hills and woods whirling in
glorified riot through an infinity of moon mists and star dust. He felt
suddenly mature and strong and catching her in his arms he pressed her
close, kissing her hair and temples until she, fluttering with the
wildness of her first embrace of love, turned her lips up to his kisses.

But soon Conscience drew away and at once her cheeks grew hot with
blushes and maidenly remorse. She had been reared in an uncompromising
school of puritanism. Her father would have regarded her behavior as
profoundly shocking. She herself, now that it was over, regarded it so,
though she wildly and rebelliously told herself that she would not undo
it, if she could.

"Oh," she exclaimed in a low voice, "oh, Stuart, what were we thinking
about!"

"We were thinking that we belong to each other," he fervently assured
her. "As long as I live I belong to you--and to no one else, and you--"

"But we're only children," she demurred, with a sudden outcropping of
the practical in the midst of romanticism. "How do we know we won't
change our minds?"

"I won't change mine," he said staunchly. "And I won't let you change
yours. You will write to me, won't you?" he eagerly demanded, but she
shook her head.

"Father doesn't let me write to boys," she told him.

"At least you'll be back--next summer?"

"I'm afraid not. I don't know."

Stuart Farquaharson drew a long breath. His face set itself in rigid
resolve.

"If they send you to the North Pole and stop all my letters and put a
regiment of soldiers around you, and keep them there, it won't alter
matters in the long run," he asseverated, with boyhood assurance, "You
belong to me and you are going to marry me."

A voice from the house began calling and the girl answered quickly, "I'm
just in the garden. I'll be right in." But before she went she turned to
the boy again and her eyes were dancing incorrigibly.

"You won't go out and join any Newmarket cadets or anything and get
killed meanwhile, will you?"

"I will not," he promptly replied. "And when we have