o do what you want me
to do."

"You know a lot about girls, don't you?" she mocked.

"Me, I'm a wiz," he agreed with her derision.

Keller spoke absently, considering whether this might be the propitious
moment to try his luck. They had been comrades together in an adventure
well concluded. Both were thinking of what Dixon had said. It seemed to
Larrabie that it would be a wonderful thing if they might ride back
through the warm sunlight with this new miracle of her love in his life.
It was at the meeting of their fingers, when he gave her the bridle,
that he spoke.

"I've got to say it, Miss Phyllis. I've got to know where I stand."

She understood him of course. The touch of their eyes had warmed her
even before he began. But "Stand how?" she repeated feebly.

"With you. I love you! We both know that. What about you? Could you care
for me? Do you?"

Her shy, deep eyes met his fairly. "I don't know. Sometimes I think I
do, and then sometimes I think I don't--that way."

The touch of affection that made his face occasionally tender as a
woman's, lit his warm smile.

"Couldn't you make that first sometimes always, don't you reckon,
Phyllis?"

"Ah! If I knew! But I don't--truly, I don't. I--I want to care," she
confessed, with divine shyness.

"That's good listening. Couldn't you go ahead on those times you do,
honey?"

"No!" She drew back from his advance. "No--give me time. I'm--I'm not
sure--I'm not at all sure. I can't explain, but----"

"Can't decide between me and another man?" he suggested, by way of a
joke, to lighten her objection.

Then, in a flash, he knew that by accident he had hit the truth. The
startled look of doubt in her eyes told him. Perhaps she had not known
it herself before, but his words had clarified her mind. There was
another man in the running--one not to be thrust aside easily.

Phyllis' first impulse was to be alone. She turned her face away and
busied herself with a stirrup leather.

"Don't say anything more now--please. I'm such a little goose! I don't
know--yet. Won't you wait and--forget it till--say, till next week?"

He promised to wait, but he did not promise to forget it. As they rode
home, he made cheerful talk on many subjects; but the one in both their
minds was that which had been banned. Every silence was full charged
with it. Its suppression ran like quicksilver through every spoken
sentence.

CHAPTER XVI

A WATERSPOUT

Almost imperceptibly, B