sure, no rebuke. Instead, here she was running away to think out a
plan whereby she might hear the whole story of the feud, and more,
from Haig himself.

The morning advanced in rose and pearl nuances. A hundred tantalizing
perfumes filled the air; field-spiders' webs sparkled in the dew like
silver gossamer; meadow larks rose at her feet, and wove delicate
patterns in the air with threads of melody. Who could think amid such
diverting beauty? She lifted her head, and went singing through the
meadows, knee-deep in the wet and clinging grass, and laughing when
the parted branches of the willows splashed her face and drenched her.
And then, at the first cast she made into a still, deep pool, where
the night loitered under the very eye of day, an imprudent trout took
the gray hackle fly, and made off with it. The splash, and the "zip"
of the tightening line through the water; and then the fight, and the
capture--Well, if they were going to rise like that--

The sun was high before she became aware that she was very hot and
tired and hungry. Her shoes were soaking wet, her skirts and stockings
splashed with mud; one shoulder was being sunburned where a twig had
caught and ripped her white flannel waist; and Seth's red silk
handkerchief around her neck was scarcely a deeper crimson than her
face.

"But I can't catch them all in one day!" she exclaimed reluctantly,
leaning wearily against a tree.

At that instant, under her very eyes, a trout leaped in the nearby
pool.

"Impudence!" she cried. "I'll just get you, and then quit."

But it was one pool too many; for at the second cast her hook caught
in the rough bark of a log that projected far out into the stream.

"Oh! Now I've done it!" she groaned.

Several smart tugs at the line, with a whipping of the rod to right
and left of the log, convinced her that the hook was too deeply
embedded to be released by any such operation. Sinking down on a heap
of driftwood on the bank, she gloomily contemplated the consequences
of her greed. There were two ways to go about it now,--to break the
line and leave the hook to its fate, or to crawl out on the log and
rescue it. The first was unsportsmanlike, the second was very likely
to be dangerous.

"Um-m-m!" she muttered, with a grimace. "It's not easy."

The log ran out, at a slight inclination upward, from the center of
the heap of driftwood, and its free end, where the hackle fly reposed
at a distance of fully twenty feet