ame and was gone as her love for him
surged up again, and it was the same sort of sting, only stronger, that
she had felt as a little girl when she thought of him as happy in his
boyish pursuits with any one but her. It did not matter now whether it
was Little Saxon or Big Bill. She told herself in her own little room
that she was a jealous cat. But--

"Oh, dear God, how I love you, Wayne!"

Then, when the days passed and she did not hear from him, there came
for the first time a quick fear which was the first ally of that twinge
of jealousy. The fifth day came, the day on which he was riding to
Laughter Lake with Ruf Ettinger, and she could not know that his every
thought was of her. She only felt that, had she been the man, she
would not have stayed away. And there came the question and the fear,

"Does he love me as I love him?"

The old, lovers' question ever since Aucassin and Nicolette; the matter
for long debate and reiterated argument: "It may not be that thou
shouldst love me even as I love thee!" She found herself blushing
hotly as she rode alone through the forest at the thought that she was
again going to meet him, and that he did not come to meet her. She
felt suddenly ashamed and angry both with him and with herself. Was
she, to him, like a ripe apple that had dropped into his hand at the
touch? Did he think other--?

Her face crimson she reined the startled Gypsy around with a savage
jerk, turned her back squarely upon the Bar L-M, and without a look
behind her rode swiftly in the opposite direction. She rode for an
hour, not turning once, although many a time her heart fluttered wildly
and then grew painfully still at some slight noise which to her
yearning ears sounded like the thud of a horse's hoofs behind her.

To-day she crossed the narrow valley toward the cliffs rising like a
wall upon the far side of Echo Creek. Stubbornly she shut her mind
from its daily wanderings; her camera, that she had not used for a
week, was going to work for her to-day. The birds that had come
trooping back from wintering in the south--robins and blue birds, blue
jays and woodpeckers, larks and yellow hammers--made merry din in the
morning air. Shep, running on ahead as usual, disturbed half a dozen
grouse from the underbrush in a little canon, and the muffled roll of
their whirring wings threw Shep into brief consternation and prolonged
subsequent joy. She saw the bob and flash of a rabbit's tail, n