of
delicately veined quartz, he stopped embarrassed. Miss Nellie, however,
leaped to one foot, and, shaking the other over the pool, put her hand
on his shoulder to steady herself. "You haven't got a towel--or," she
said dubiously, looking at her small handkerchief, "anything to dry
them on?"

But Low did not, as she perhaps expected, offer his own handkerchief.

"If you take a bath after our fashion," he said gravely, "you must
learn to dry yourself after our fashion."

Lifting her again lightly in his arms, he carried her a few steps to
the sunny opening, and bade her bury her feet in the dried mosses and
baked withered grasses that were bleaching in a hollow. The young girl
uttered a cry of childish delight, as the soft ciliated fibres touched
her sensitive skin.

"It is healing, too," continued Low; "a moccasin filled with it after a
day on the trail makes you all right again."

But Miss Nellie seemed to be thinking of something else.

"Is that the way the squaws bathe and dry themselves?"

"I don't know; you forget I was a boy when I left them."

"And you're sure you never knew any?"

"None."

The young girl seemed to derive some satisfaction in moving her feet up
and down for several minutes among the grasses in the hollow; then,
after a pause, said, "You are quite certain I am the first woman that
ever touched this spring?"

"Not only the first woman, but the first human being, except myself."

"How nice!"

They had taken each other's hands; seated side by side, they leaned
against a curving elastic root that half supported, half encompassed
them. The girl's capricious, fitful manner succumbed as before to the
near contact of her companion. Looking into her eyes, Low fell into a
sweet, selfish lover's monologue, descriptive of his past and present
feelings towards her, which she accepted with a heightened color, a
slight exchange of sentiment, and a strange curiosity. The sun had
painted their half-embraced silhouettes against the slanting
tree-trunk, and began to decline unnoticed; the ripple of the water
mingling with their whispers came as one sound to the listening ear;
even their eloquent silences were as deep, and, I wot, perhaps as
dangerous, as the darkened pool that filled so noiselessly a dozen
yards away. So quiet were they that the tremor of invading wings once
or twice shook the silence, or the quick scamper of frightened feet
rustled the dead grass. But in the midst of a prolonged