or at least
of some other human presence. She understood his questioning look. "I
am alone," she said.

The quality of her voice startled him more then her words. There was a
deeper, darker glow in her eyes as she watched their effect upon him.
She swept out a gleaming white arm, still moist with the water of the
pool, taking in the wide, autumn-tinted spaces about them.

"I am alone," she repeated, still keeping her eyes on his face.
"Entirely alone. That is why you startled me--why I was afraid. This is
my hiding-place, and I thought--"

He saw that she had spoken words that she would have recalled. She
hesitated. Her lips trembled. In that moment of suspense a little gray
ermine dislodged a stone from the rock ridge above them, and at the
sound of it as it struck behind her the girl gave a start, and a quick
flash of the old fear leaped for an instant into her face. And now
Philip beheld something in her which he had been too bewildered and
wonder-struck to observe before. Her first terror had been so acute
that he had failed to see what remained after her fright had passed.
But it was clear to him now, and the look that came into his own face
told her that he had made the discovery.

The beauty of her face, her eyes, her hair--the wonder of her presence
six hundred miles from civilization--had held him spellbound. He had
seen only the deep lustre and the wonderful blue of her eyes. Now he
saw that those eyes, exquisite in their loveliness, were haunted by
something which she was struggling to fight back--a questing, hunted
look that burned there steadily, and of which he was not the cause. A
deep-seated grief, a terror far back, shone through the forced calmness
with which she was speaking to him. He knew that she was fighting with
herself, that the nervously twitching fingers at her breast told more
than her lips had confessed. He stepped nearer to her and held out a
hand, and when he spoke his voice was vibrant with the thing that made
men respect him and women have faith in him.

"Tell me--what you started to say," he entreated quietly. "This is your
hiding-place, and you thought--what? I think that I can guess. You
thought that I was some one else, whom you have reason to fear."

She did not answer. It was as if she had not yet completely measured
him. Her eyes told him that. They were not looking AT him, but INTO
him. And they were softly beautiful as wood violets. He found himself
looking steadily into