to shield her eyes. She slid from the tree-trunk and swayed
unsteadily, and groped out and found his arm. And it was the boy he
had just tried to comfort who curled both hands tightly around his
flannel sleeve and hid a wet face against his shoulder.

"I--I'm sorry. I'm so terribly, terribly sorry. I shouldn't have let
you start to tell me--I knew it all along. But I'm not pitying--big
Stephen O'Mara; it--it was just little Steve who made me cry, I think."
Again that long, sobbing breath. "Will you--will you--I can't find my
handkerchief," she gasped.

Long after they had remounted and turned their horses toward the south
Barbara rode with head bowed, slim shoulders turned toward the man
beside her, a shield for her averted face. From time to time she
dabbled furtively at her eyes with the big, crisp square of linen with
which Steve had answered the wailed announcement of the loss of her own
handkerchief. Once or twice she caught her breath, unsteadily. And
yet in spite of the fact that the actual desire was furthest of all
things from her heart at that instant, when she did finally grow
curious at his long silence and turn to steal a sidelong glance at him,
the utter gloom upon Steve's face awoke within her an irresistible
impulse to mirth.

It was partly hysterical, partly the sudden realization that he was not
the only one who had, that morning, found much in his companion which
was insistently boyish. For until then she had not glimpsed this side
of that grown-up spirit which, in the boy, had evinced more than once a
confidence in self so serenely unshakable that it had bordered on
doggedness at times.

In those days it had always irritated her, and set her small fists to
clenching in a childish antagonism. More than once she had answered it
with superior little, child-woman smiles which had sent him marching,
white of face and lip, back through the hedge gap, never realizing
herself that her own pique sprang from the belief that his promises of
conquest dealt only with material things--splendidly visioned, most
vaguely detailed conquests which set his eyes afire but seemed to hold
no place for the feminine of her. She had never understood that he,
with quite masculine bindness [Transcriber's note: blindness?], had
taken for granted her comprehension that each and every conquest was to
be solely a glorification of her, any more than she understood now why
his black discouragement awakened in her a s