Her feet fell into a tiny graveled path, and she drifted aimlessly
along it, musing on the meaning of what she had heard. Almost she
had persuaded herself that the gray stone building was an enchanted
palace, and herself a fairy messenger sent to break the spell, when
the delight of pushing through a tiny turnstile and finding a
running brook with a waterfall in it close at hand, drove everything
else from her mind. The grounds had completely changed their
character by now: the turnstile marked the end of cultivation, and
the little path, no longer graveled, wound through the wild
woodland. Here and there a boulder blocked the way; the undergrowth
became dense; great clumps of fern and rhododendron sent out their
heavy, rank odors. Now and again the spicy scent of warm pines and
cedars prepared the ear for the gentle, ceaseless rustle of their
stiff foliage; little scufflings and chitterings at the ground level
told of wood-people wakened by the presence of Red Rufus.

A strange whitish bulk that glimmered through the thinning
foreground, too big for even a big boulder, too symmetrical and
quiet for a waterfall, tempted Caroline on, and she pressed forward
hastily, lost in speculation, when a sudden odor foreign to the
woods stopped her short at the very edge of a little glade, and she
paused, sniffing curiously.

A man, bareheaded, with grizzled curly hair, turned suddenly, not
ten feet from her, and stared dumfounded at her, his twisted, brown
cigar an inch from his lips.

The torn-out sleeve of her nightgown had bared one side to her
waist: the great rent that slit the lower half of the garment left
one slender leg uncovered above her white knee. A spray of wild
azalea wreathed her dark tumbled hair, and Rufus, his plumy tail
curled around her feet in the shadow, and his green eyes flaming,
might have been a baby panther. She leaned one hand on the rough
bark of a chestnut and gazed with startled eyes at the man; it
seemed that the forest must swallow her at a breath from a human
throat.

He lifted one hand and pinched the back of the other with it till
his face contorted with the pain.

"Then there _are_ such things!" he said softly; "well, why not?"

He moved forward almost imperceptibly.

"If I were younger, I should know you were not possible," he
muttered, "but now I know that I have never doubted you--really."

Again he took a small step. Caroline, paralyzed with fear and
embarrassment, for she t