hy had he never before noticed that she was so much prettier than any
other girl he had ever seen? What was there in the touch of her hand to
make him feel like the iron in the forge fire--warm and glowing and
putty-soft and yielding? Other girls were not that way. Only a half-hour
since, Ardea Dabney had put her hand in his when she had said good-by,
and that feeling was the kind you have when you have climbed through
breathless summer woods to a high mountain top and the cool breeze blows
through your hair and makes you quietly glad and lifted-up and
satisfied.

These were questions to be buried deep in the secret places, and yet he
had a curious eagerness to talk to Nan about them; to find out if she
could understand. But he could not get near to any serious or
confidential side of her. Her mood was playful, hilarious, daring. Once
she ran squirrel-like out on the bole of a great tree leaning to its
fall over the cliff, hung her piggin on a broken limb, and told him he
must go after it. Next it was a squeeze through some "fat-man's-misery"
crevice in the water-worn sandstone, with a cry to him to come on if he
were not a girl-boy. And when they were fairly under the overhanging
cliff face of Sunday Rock, she darted away, laughing back at him over
her shoulder, and daring him to follow her along a dizzy shelf half-way
up the crag; a narrow ledge, perilous for a mountain goat.

This, as he remembered later, was the turning-point in her mood. In
imagination he saw her try it and fail; saw her lithe, shapely beauty
lying broken and mangled at the cliff's foot; and in three bounds he had
her fast locked in his restraining arms. She strove with him at first,
like a wrestling boy, laughing and taunting him with being afraid for
himself. Then--

Tom Gordon, clean-hearted as yet, did not know precisely what happened.
Suddenly she stopped struggling and lay panting in his arms, and quite
as suddenly he released her.

"Nan!" he said, in a swiftly submerging wave of tenderness, "I didn't go
to hurt you!"

She sank down on a stone at his feet and covered her face with her
hands. But she was up again and turning from him with eyes downcast
before he could comfort her.

"I ain't hurt none," she said gravely. And then: "I reckon we'd better
be gettin' them berries. It looks like it might shower some; and paw'll
kill me if I ain't home time to get his supper."

Here was an end of the playtime, and Tom helped industriously wit