ly accentuated. She drew a long, deep breath
and, letting the reins drop, stretched out both arms toward the splendor
of the sky-line.

"It is so beautiful--so beautiful!" she cried, with the rapture of a
child, "and it all spells Freedom. I should like to be the freest thing
that has life under heaven. What is the freest thing in the world?"

She turned her face on him with the question, and her eyes widened after
a way they had until they seemed to be searching far out in the fields
of untalked-of things, and seeing there something that clouded them with
disquietude.

"I should like to be a man," she went on, "a man and a _hobo_." The
furrow vanished and the eyes suddenly went dancing. "That is what I
should like to be--a hobo with a tomato-can and a fire beside the
railroad-track."

The man said nothing, and she looked up to encounter a steady gaze from
eyes somewhat puzzled.

His pupils held a note of pained seriousness, and her voice became
responsively vibrant as she leaned forward with answering gravity in her
own.

"What is it?" she questioned. "You are troubled."

He looked away beyond her to the pine-topped hills, which seemed to be
marching with lances and ragged pennants, against the orange field of
the sky. Then his glance came again to her face.

"They call me the Shadow," he said slowly. "You know whose shadow that
means. These weeks have made us comrades, and I am jealous because you
are the sum of two girls, and I know only one of them. I am jealous of
the other girl at home in Europe. I am jealous that I don't know why
you, who are seemingly subject only to your own fancy, should crave the
freedom of the hobo by the railroad track."

She bent forward to adjust a twisted martingale, and for a moment her
face was averted. In her hidden eyes at that moment, there was deep
suffering, but when she straightened up she was smiling.

"There is nothing that you shall not know. But not yet--not yet! After
all, perhaps it's only that in another incarnation I was a vagrant bee
and I'm homesick for its irresponsibility."

"At all events"--he spoke with an access of boyish enthusiasm--"I 'thank
whatever gods may be' that I have known you as I have. I'm glad that we
have not just been idly rich together. Why, Cara, do you remember the
day we lost our way in the far woods, and I foraged corn, and you
scrambled stolen eggs? We were forest folk that day; primitive as in the
years when things were young and