had a kindly
expression in them, and a look of amusement lurked there also.

"No; she never married," he said. "Nor did he."

"Oh, I am glad of that," she exclaimed; and then more softly added, "I
know he did not."

Dr. Balsam gazed at her calmly. He did not pursue the subject further.
He thought he had told his story in such a way as to convey the moral
without disclosing that he spoke of himself. Yet she had discovered it
instantly. He wondered if she had seen also the moral he intended
to convey.

Alice Yorke was able to walk now, and many an afternoon Gordon Keith
invited her to stroll with him on the mountain-side or up the Ridge,
drawing her farther and farther as her strength returned.

The Spring is a dangerous season for a young man and a pretty girl to be
thrown closely together for the first time, and the budding woods are a
perilous pasture for their browsing thoughts. It was not without some
insight that the ancient poets pictured dryads as inhabitants of the
woods, and made the tinkling springs and rippling streams the
abiding-places of their nymphs.

The Spring came with a burst of pink and green. The mountains took on
delicate shades, and the trees blossomed into vast flowers, feathery and
fine as lace.

An excursion in the budding woods has been dangerous ever since the day
when Eve found a sinuous stranger lurking there in gay disguise, and was
beguiled into tasting the tempting fruit he offered her. It might be an
interesting inquiry to collect even the most notable instances of those
who, wandering all innocent and joyous amid the bowers, have found the
honey of poisonous flowers where they meant only innocence. But the
reader will, perhaps, recall enough instances in a private and
unrecorded history to fill the need of illustration. It suffices, then,
to say that, each afternoon that Gordon Keith wandered with Alice Yorke
through the leafy woods, he was straying farther in that perilous path
where the sunlight always sifts down just ahead, but the end is veiled
in mist, and where sometimes darkness falls.

These strolls had all the charm for him of discovery, for he was always
finding in her some new trait, and every one was, he thought, an added
charm, even to her unexpected alternations of ignorance and knowledge,
her little feminine outbreaks of caprice. One afternoon they had
strolled farther than usual, as far even as the high pines beyond which
was the great rock looking to the north