Tom sat back on his heels and regarded her thoughtfully. His first
impulse was out of the natural heart, rageful, wounded vanity spurring
it on. It was like her heathenish impertinence to look on at such a
time, and then to taunt him about it afterward.

But slowly as he looked a curious change came over him. She was the same
Nan Bryerson, bareheaded, barelegged, with the same tousled mat of dark
hair, and the same childish indifference to a whole frock. And yet she
was not the same. The subtle difference, whatever it was, made him get
up and offer to shake hands with her,--and he thought it was the
newly-made vows constraining him, and took credit therefor.

"You can revile me as much as you like now, Nan," he said, with prideful
humility. "You can't make me mad any more, like you used to."

"Why can't I?" she demanded.

"Because I'm older now, and--and better, I hope. I shall never forget
that you have a precious soul to save."

Her response to this was a scoffing laugh, shrill and challenging. Yet
he could not help thinking that it made her look prettier than before.

"You can laugh as much as you want to; but I mean it," he insisted.
"And, besides, Nan,--of all the things that I've been wanting to come
back to, you're the only one that isn't changed." And again he thought
it was righteous guile that was making him kind to her.

In a twinkling the mocking hardness went out of her eyes and she leaned
across the barrel mouth and touched his hand.

"D'you reckon you shorely mean that, Tom Gordon?" she said; and the lips
which lent themselves so easily to scorn were tremulous. She was just
his age, and womanhood was only a step across the threshold for her.

"Of course, I do. Let me carry your bucket for you."

She had hung the little wooden piggin under the drip of the spring and
it was full and running over. But when he had lifted it out for her, she
rinsed and emptied it.

"I just set it there to cool some," she explained. "I'm goin' up to
Sunday Rock afte' huckleberries. Come and go 'long with me, Tom."

He assented with a willingness as eager as it was unaccountable. If she
had asked him to do a much less reasonable thing, he was not sure that
he could have refused.

And as they went together through the wood, spicy with the June
fragrances, questions like those of the boyhood time thronged on him,
and he welcomed them as a return of at least one of the vanished
thrills--and was grateful to her.

W