rn tumbled down a spiral staircase of dark
polished rock. She ran about the pools at its feet, crying that this wee
one was red as rust, that this big one was red as a red rose--was it
not, if you looked in the very middle? But suddenly she looked up into
his face and asked, "You'll have seen grand waterfalls out in Brazil?"

"Yes," he said, "but I like this as well, and I would rather be here
than anywhere else in the world."

"Tell me the names of some of the big waterfalls," she insisted,
uninterested in the loving things that he had said.

"Well, the falls of Paulo Affonso are pretty good."

"Paulo Affonso!" she repeated, her face avaricious with the desire for
adventure, "I will go there some day...."

That she should feel so intensely about something which did not concern
himself roused his jealousy, and he set himself to interrupt her train
of thought by saying boisterously, "This is a ripping place! What's it
like above the fall? Let's climb it." He strolled closer to the
waterfall to see if there was an easy way up the rock, but was recalled
by a ready, embarrassed murmur from her.

"I can't...."

He imagined she was moved by shame at his greater strength, as she had
been when they ran together, and he said encouragingly:

"Why not? You've got nailed boots."

But she continued to stand stiffly on a rock by the edge of the red
pool, and stared over his head at the spray and repeated, "I can't."

He wondered from her blush if in his ignorance of girls he had done
something to offend her, and turned away; but she misunderstood that,
and cried fierily:

"Och, I'm not feared! I've done it twenty times. But I took a vow. Oh,"
she faltered, suddenly the youngest of all articulate things, "you'll
laugh at me!"

"I won't!" he answered fiercely and gripped one of her hands.

"It was like this," she said, looking round-eyed and dewily solemn like
a child in church. "Climbing up there used to be a great pleasure to me.
I used to come here a lot with Rachael Wing. And then I heard Victor
Grayson speak--oh, he is a wonderful man; he seemed hardly airthly; you
felt you had to make some sacrifice. I made a vow I'd never climb it
again till I had done something for the social revolution. And I've not
done a thing yet."

They exchanged a long, confiding look, a mutual pressure of their souls;
but before he could say something reverently sympathetic she had uttered
a sharp exclamation, and was looking past him at