on a dry stick. . . . And to-day I came
back . . . without any apparent reason. . . . I don't know what on earth
has happened to make me--make me--forget----"

"Forget what?"

"Everything--except----"

"Except what?"

She looked up at him with clear grey eyes, a trifle daunted.

"Forget everything except that I--like you, Mr. Sayre."

He said: "That is the sweetest and most fearless thing a woman ever said.
I am absurdly happy over it."

She waited, looking down at her linked fingers.

"And," he said, "for the first time in all my life I have cared more for
what a woman has said to me than I care for anything on earth."

There was a good deal of the poet in William Sayre.

"Do you mean it?" she asked, tremulously.

"I mean more."

"I--I think you had better not say--more."

"Why?"

"Because of what I told you. There is no use in your--your finding
me--interesting."

"Are you married?" he asked, so guilelessly that she blushed and denied
it with haste.

His head was spinning in a sea of pink clouds. Harps were playing
somewhere; it may have been the breeze in the pines.

"Amourette," he repeated in a sort of divine daze.

"I am--going," she said, in a low voice.

"Do you desire to render me miserable for life?" he asked so seriously
that at first she scarcely realised what he had said. Then blush and
pallor came and went; she caught her breath, looked up at him,
beseechingly.

"Everything is wrong," she said in the ghost of a voice. "Things are
hurrying me--trying to drive me headlong. I must go. Let me go, now."

And she sat very still, and closed her eyes. A second later she opened
them.

"Why did you come?" she asked almost fiercely. "There was no use in it!
Why did you come into these woods for that foolish newspaper? By this
time the Associated Press, the police, and the families of the men you
are looking for have received letters from every one of the four missing
young men, saying that they are perfectly well and happy and expect to
return--after their honeymoons."

Flushed, excited, beautiful in her animation, she faced the astounded
young man who stared at her wildly through his eye-glasses.

After a while he managed to ask whether she wished him to believe that
these four young men had each eloped with their soul mates.

She bit her lip. "To be accurate," she said in a low voice, "somebody
eloped with each one of them."

"How? I don't understand!"

"I don't wish you to. . .