perhaps fifty feet further back,
there was a splotch of light indicating a way out there into the open
day. But the bottomless abyss shut off all passage to the other side,
its echoes growling threateningly as though they were what they seemed
to the girl's quickened fancies, the restless mutterings of giant
things imprisoned in the deepest bowels of the earth.

"If I ever wanted to run away from all the world," she mused
fantastically, "I'd come here!"

And then, suddenly shuddering, she went back hurriedly to the open.

CHAPTER XII

THE TALES OF MR. WILLIE DART

Being a girl very much in love, her lover had been already as long out
of her thoughts as he could ever be, and now he came back into them and
became the centre of them.

She sat down just outside the doorway of the cave, hat, gauntlets,
glasses and camera at her side, her knees clasped in her hands and
stared away through the cedar's intricate, rustling needles and across
the tops of the forest sweeping away from the cliffs across the verdant
miles, and day dreamed. This newly found cave was her own, absolutely
her own. No other man or woman in the world knew of it. She would
come here again, always careful that no chance eye saw her; she would
bring little things to make of it a lady's bower set above the leafy
world. There would come, in due season, cushions which she would work
secretly in her bedroom at home and which she would fill here with
fragrant pine needles and sweet scented herbs; there would be a book or
two; little, unused things would disappear from Julia's kitchen, a tea
pot, a bit of coffee, knives, forks and spoons; and some day when the
full summer had brought the sunshine that would dissipate the shadows
of these last days Wayne Shandon would come here, would stand under the
cliffs looking up wonderingly; would climb her magic ladder and dine
with her.

As she sat, leaning back against the rocks, daydreaming as Youth cannot
help doing, her eyes wandered far across her father's ranch. She found
the view new to her. Yonder nothing but the fresh green of the tops
fir and pine had thrust upward in the spring; beneath them, seen only
now and then as it frisked out of shadow and glinted in sunlight, Echo
Creek; beyond the creek--

She sat up straight, suddenly picking up her field glasses. Yes,
beyond all this she saw the knoll upon which her father's house stood,
even the building itself through its clump of cedars. Bu