Perhaps he had not heard. He was thinking:

"When he does break Little Saxon--that wild devil of a man on that wild
devil of a horse-- What a pair of them!"

CHAPTER VII

THE GLADNESS THAT SINGS

"Well?" laughingly. "Don't you know me?"

Wayne Shandon, riding idly down a lane through the pines, had come
close before he saw her sitting with her back to a tree, her camera and
empty lunch basket lying beside her. He had left Big Bill and had come
on alone, passing around the head of the lake and following the trail
which Little Saxon's flying hoofs had made in the fresh sod. Now, as
with a quick hand upon Lady Lightfoot's reins he came to a stop, he
very promptly forgot all about Little Saxon.

The girl, leaving Gypsy tethered beyond a grove of firs, had found upon
the skirt of a densely wooded slope a spot that was like a corner of a
woodland fairyland, dim and dusky and sweet scented. The noontide was
warm with the rippling sunlight above, a down-filtering ray touched her
bare head and dropped flecks of gold in her braided hair.

Shandon, motionless for a little, did not speak nor did his expression
change except that it grew more frankly filled with admiration, with
sheer wonder at her loveliness.

"Really," she bantered, still laughingly, not to be confused by her old
playfellow's look. "I'm neither ghost, goblin nor evil spirit, nor
anything worse than just a girl, you know!"

"Are you . . . just a girl?" He raised his hand slowly, lifting his
hat. But not yet did he smile back into her smiling eyes. She had
never seen him so grave. "I don't know. You are not the same girl I
used to know."

"Why, Wayne," she retorted merrily. "It's only a year. You weren't
expecting wrinkles already, were you?"

The steadiness of his gaze made her wonder. His eyes clung to hers for
a long moment, left them to travel swiftly up and down the sweet young
body that was no longer the body of "just a girl," noted how
wonderfully the promise of girlhood had been fulfilled in budding
womanhood, came back to her hair and throat and smiling mouth, rested
again upon her eyes.

"You are not the same Wanda I used to know," he insisted soberly,
shaking his head at her. "Not the Wanda I used to play with at school,
to hunt birds' nests with, to steal apples for, to fight other boys
for. Who are you, you wonderful thing?"

"The same Wanda," she told him merrily. "And, if you please, not a
_thing_ at all."