ense seconds her struggles were all housed far within
his arms; there was no longer play for the faintest of them; and she was
strained until she felt her heart rush out to him as she had once felt
it go to her dream of a single love,--with the utter abandon of the
falling water beside them.

On the opposite side of the park across the half-acre of waving
bunch-grass, a many-pronged old buck in his thin red summer coat lay at
the edge of the quaking aspens, sunning the velvet of his tender new
horns to harden them against approaching combats. He had shrewdly noted
that the first comer did not see him; but this second was a creature of
action in whose presence it were ill-advised to linger. Noiselessly his
hindquarters raised from the ground, and then with a snort of
indignation and a mighty, crashing rush he was off through the trees and
up the hill. Doubtless the beast cherished a delusion of clever escape
from a dangerous foe; but neither of the pair standing so near saw or
heard him or would have been conscious of him even had he led past them
in wild flight the biggest herd it had ever been his lot to domineer.
For these two were lost to all but the wonder of the moment, pushing
fearfully on into the glory and sweetness of it.

His voice came to her in a dull murmur, and the sound of the running
water came, again like the muffled tinkling of little silver bells in
the distance. Both his arms were strong about her, and now her own hands
rose in rebellion to meet where the kerchief was knotted at the back of
his neck, quite as the hands of the other woman had rebelliously flung
down the scarf from the balcony. Then the brim of his hat came down over
her hair, and her lips felt his kiss.

They stood so a long time, it seemed to them, in the high grass, amid
the white-barked quaking aspens, while a little wind from the dark pines
at their side, lowered now to a yearning softness, played over them.
They were aroused at last by a squirrel that ran half-way down the trunk
of a near-by spruce to bark indignantly at them, believing they menaced
his winter's store of spruce cones piled at the foot of the tree. With
rattle after rattle his alarm came, until he had the satisfaction of
noting an effect.

The young man put the girl away from him to look upon her in the new
light that enveloped them both, still holding her hands.

"There's one good thing about your marriages,--they marry you for
eternity, don't they? That's f