e stream where it widened out
placidly, stepping on boulders. Always King went ahead, holding out his
hand to her. Once she slipped, but before her boot had broken the
surface of the water his arm was about her. He caught her up, holding
her an instant. Gloria began to laugh. Then, as she regarded it, a
thoroughly astonishing thing happened; she felt her face flushing,
hotter and hotter, until it burned. She laughed again, a trifle
uncertainly, and jumped unaided to the next boulder and across to the
pebbly shallows, wading out through six inches of water.

"Little fool!" she chided herself, hot with vexation. "What in the world
did you want to blush like that for? He will think you are about ten
years old."

For his part King stood stock-still a moment, regarding the water
rushing about him. He had caught her to save her from falling, he had
held her for something less than a round second. And yet something of
her pervaded his senses, it had been a second fraught with intimacy, her
hair had blown across his face, she had thrilled through him like a
sudden burst of music ... When he jerked his head up and looked at her
he could not see her face; she was very busy with a white pebble she
had picked up. He jumped across to land and went on, and the incident
sank away into silence.

He was glad to come to what he called the door to the Hidden Place. He
opened it for her; that is, he shoved aside a mass of leaves, holding
the branches back with his body. Gloria went through the opening thus
afforded, climbed a long, slanting whitish granite slab, and cried out
ecstatically at the beauty of the spot. Before her was a tiny meadow, as
green and smooth as velvet, thick with white and yellow violets. About
it, rimming it in clean lines which did not invade the sward, were
pines, and beyond the pines, to be seen in broken glimpses among their
sturdy straight trunks, were the cliffs shutting all in. Through one of
these vistas she saw a white waterfall, its wide-flung drops of spray
all the colours of the rainbow as the sun caught them. The water fell
into a green pool, spilled over, flowed through a rock channel of its
own ancient carving, and curved away through the meadow. On the edge of
this granite basin, with showers of spray breaking over it, a little
bird bobbed and dipped and, lifting its head with its own inimitably
bright gesture, broke into a sweet singing as liquidly musical as the
falling water.

"The Water-Ouze