"But what will your mother think of that?" he said, in grave
astonishment.

She colored again as she returned, quickly, "Of course, you must not
write to the house. You can leave a letter somewhere for me--say,
somewhere about here. Stop!" she added, with a sudden girlish gayety,
"see, here's the very place. Look there!"

She pointed to the decayed trunk of a blasted sycamore, a few feet from
the trail. A cavity, breast high, half filled with skeleton leaves and
pine-nuts, showed that it had formerly been a squirrel's hoard, but for
some reason had been deserted.

"Look! it's a regular letter-box," she continued, gayly, rising on
tip-toe to peep into its recesses. Don Caesar looked at her
admiringly; it seemed like a return to their first idyllic love-making
in the old days, when she used to steal out of the cabbage rows in her
brown linen apron and sun-bonnet to walk with him in the woods. He
recalled the fact to her with the fatality of a lover already seeking
to restore in past recollections something that was wanting in the
present. She received it with the impatience of youth, to whom the
present is all sufficient.

"I wonder how you could ever have cared for me in that holland apron,"
she said, looking down upon her new dress.

"Shall I tell you why?" he said, fondly, passing his arm around her
waist, and drawing her pretty head nearer his shoulder.

"No--not now!" she said, laughingly, but struggling to free herself.
"There's not time. Write it, and put it in the box. There," she added,
hastily, "listen!--what's that?"

"It's only a squirrel," he whispered reassuringly in her ear.

"No; it's somebody coming! I must go! Please! Caesar, dear! There,
then--"

She met his kiss half-way, released herself with a lithe movement of
her wrist and shoulder, and the next moment seemed to slip into the
woods, and was gone.

Don Caesar listened with a sigh as the last rustling ceased, cast a
look at the decayed tree as if to fix it in his memory, and then slowly
retraced his steps towards his tethered mustang.

He was right, however, in his surmise of the cause of that
interruption. A pair of bright eyes had been watching them from the
bough of an adjacent tree. It was a squirrel, who, having had serious
and prior intentions of making use of the cavity they had discovered,
had only withheld examination by an apparent courteous discretion
towards the intruding pair. Now that they were gone he slip