id not know how to express it. At first she
pounced upon him in mirthful, almost impish glee, teasing and mocking
and half scaring him, despite his fifteen years of young manhood.

"Yes, they is devils down yonder behind the swamp," she would whisper,
warningly, when, after the first meeting, he had crept back again and
again, half fascinated, half amused to greet her; "I'se seen 'em, I'se
heard 'em, 'cause my mammy is a witch."

The boy would sit and watch her wonderingly as she lay curled along the
low branch of the mighty oak, clinging with little curved limbs and
flying fingers. Possessed by the spirit of her vision, she would chant,
low-voiced, tremulous, mischievous:

"One night a devil come to me on blue fire out of a big red flower that
grows in the south swamp; he was tall and big and strong as anything,
and when he spoke the trees shook and the stars fell. Even mammy was
afeared; and it takes a lot to make mammy afeared, 'cause she's a witch
and can conjure. He said, 'I'll come when you die--I'll come when you
die, and take the conjure off you,' and then he went away on a big
fire."

"Shucks!" the boy would say, trying to express scornful disbelief when,
in truth, he was awed and doubtful. Always he would glance involuntarily
back along the path behind him. Then her low birdlike laughter would
rise and ring through the trees.

So passed a year, and there came the time when her wayward teasing and
the almost painful thrill of her tale-telling nettled him and drove him
away. For long months he did not meet her, until one day he saw her deep
eyes fixed longingly upon him from a thicket in the swamp. He went and
greeted her. But she said no word, sitting nested among the greenwood
with passionate, proud silence, until he had sued long for peace; then
in sudden new friendship she had taken his hand and led him through the
swamp, showing him all the beauty of her swamp-world--great shadowy oaks
and limpid pools, lone, naked trees and sweet flowers; the whispering
and flitting of wild things, and the winging of furtive birds. She had
dropped the impish mischief of her way, and up from beneath it rose a
wistful, visionary tenderness; a mighty half-confessed, half-concealed,
striving for unknown things. He seemed to have found a new friend.

And today, after he had taken Miss Taylor home and supped, he came out
in the twilight under the new moon and whistled the tremulous note that
always brought her.

"Why did