e was sitting there in her neat-fitting outing
suit of dark gray with scarlet pipings and buttons and pocket flaps,
and the scarlet of her full lips, and the coral tint of her cheeks, the
white hands and white throat and brow, the dark eyes and finely shaped
head with abundant beautiful hair.

Vic Burleigh sat looking straight at her and the light in his own eyes
told nothing of the glitter that had flashed in them when he glared at
Professor Burgess down in the Corral.

"I wasn't killing snakes. I was looking up at a girl on the rotunda
stairs the first time," he said, "and I don't want to tell about this
scar, because I've wished a thousand times to forget it. See how much
darker it is down there than it is up here."

The shadows were lengthening in the Corral where the supper fires were
gleaming. Across the low bluff the imprisoned sun was sending a dull red
glow along the waters of the Walnut.

"Look at that still place in the river, Victor. The ripples are all on
the farther side," Elinor said, looking pensively downstream.

"Watch it a minute. Do you see that bit of drift coming upstream in the
still water?" Vic asked.

"Why, the water does move; toward us, too, instead of down the river.
I'd like to boat around in that quiet place."

She was leaning forward, resting her chin in her hand. In outline
against the misty background shot through with the crimson light from
the storm-smothered sun, with the gray shadows of the old Kickapoo
Corral below them, hemmed in by the silver gleaming waters of the
Walnut, a picture grew up before Victor Burleigh's eyes that he was
never to forget. Like the cleft of the lightning through the cloud, like
the flash of the swallow's wing, the careless-hearted boy leaped to
the stature of a man, into whose soul the love of a lifetime is born.
Unconsciously, he drew away from her, and long afterward she recalled
the sweetness of his deep voice when he spoke again.

"Elinor Wream, I'd rather see you helpless up here with the hungriest
wild beast between us that ever tore a human form to pieces than to see
you in that quiet water below the shallows."

"Why?" Elinor looked up into his face.

"Because I could save your life here, maybe, even if I lost mine. Down
there I could drown for you, but that would n't save you. Nobody
ever swam that whirlpool and lived to tell about it. There's a ledge
underneath that holds down what the infernal slow suction swallows. But
it's dead sur