wing with Susan and Daddy John on the driver's seat. It seemed an
easy matter, the water chuckling round the wheels, the mules not wet
above the knees. Half way across, grown unduly confident, the doctor
turned in his saddle to address his daughter when his horse walked into
a quicksand and unseated him. It took them half an hour to drag it
out, Susan imploring that her father come back to the wagon and change
his clothes. He only laughed at her which made her angry. With
frowning brows she saw him mount again, and a dripping, white-haired
figure, set out debonairly for the opposite bank.

The sun was low, the night chill coming on when they reached it. Their
wet clothes were cold upon them and the camp pitching was hurried.
Susan bending over her fire, blowing at it with expanded cheeks and,
between her puffs, scolding at her father, first, for having got wet,
then for having stayed wet, and now for being still wet, was to David
just as charming as any of the other and milder apotheoses of the Susan
he had come to know so well. It merely added a new tang, a fresh spice
of variety, to a personality a less ravished observer might have
thought unattractively masterful for a woman.

Her fire kindled, the camp in shape, she lay down by the little blaze
with her head under a lupine plant. Her wrath had simmered to
appeasement by the retirement of the doctor into his wagon, and David,
glimpsing at her, saw that her eyes, a thread of observation between
black-fringed lids, dwelt musingly on the sky. She looked as if she
might be dreaming a maiden's dream of love. He hazarded a tentative
remark. Her eyes moved, touched him indifferently, and passed back to
the sky, and an unformed murmur, interrogation, acquiescence, casual
response, anything he pleased to think it, escaped her lips. He
watched her as he could when she was not looking at him. A loosened
strand of her hair lay among the lupine roots, one of her hands rested,
brown and upcurled, on a tiny weed its weight had broken. She turned
her head with a nestling movement, drew a deep, soft breath and her
eyelids drooped.

"David," she said in a drowsy voice, "I'm going to sleep. Wake me at
supper time."

He became rigidly quiet. When she had sunk deep into sleep, only her
breast moving with the ebb and flow of her quiet breath, he crept
nearer and drew a blanket over her, careful not to touch her. He
looked at the unconscious face for a moment, then sof