re was nothing real but love and nothing tangible
but joy. The touch of their lips had waked that delight which comes but
once in a lifetime and then to but few; it was like the moon-madness of
the tropics or the dementia of the forest folk in spring. A gentle
frenzy possessed them, rendering them insensible to fatigue and causing
them to hurry the more breathlessly that they might sooner rest and sit
beside each other. At times they fell into sweet silences where the
waters laughed with them and the trees whispered their secret, bowing
and nodding in joyous surprise at this invasion; or, again, the breezes
romped with them, withdrawing now and then to rush out and greet them
at the bends in boisterous pleasure.

They held to the bed of the stream, for its volume was low and enabled
them to ford it from bar to bar. Necia had been raised in the open,
with the wild places for her playground, and her muscles were like
those of a boy, hence the two swung merrily onward, as if in playful
contest, while the youth had never occasion to wait for her or to
moderate his gait. Indeed, her footing was more sure than his, as he
found when she ventured out unhesitatingly upon felled logs that lay
across swift, brawling depths. The wilderness had no mystery for her,
and no terrors, so she was ever at his side, or in advance, while her
eyes, schooled in the tints of the forest, and more active than those
of a bird, saw every moving thing, from the flash of a camp-robber's
wing through some hidden glade to the inquisitive nodding of a fool hen
where it perched high up against the bole of a spruce. They surprised a
marten fishing in a drift-wood dam, but she would not let the soldier
shoot, and made him pass it by, where it sat amazed till it realized
that these were lovers and resumed its fishing. Gradually the stream
diminished, and its bowldered bed became more difficult to traverse,
until, assuming the airs of a leader, the girl commanded him to lay off
his pack, at which he pretended to obey mutinously, though thrilling
with the keenest delight at his own submission.

"What are you going to do?" he inquired.

"Mind your own business, sir," she commanded, sternly.

From her belt she drew a little hunting-knife, with which she cut and
trimmed a slender birch the thickness of his thumb, whereupon he
pretended great fright, and said:

"Please! please! What have I done?"

"A great deal! You are a most bold and stubborn creature."