onveyed
nothing to Edith except that the Bride--who instantly ran up to her
room--"was mad." When she came back (the "thread" having disappeared)
Edith was full of apologies.

"Awfully sorry I mussed your hair," she said.

She went up the mountain with them, walking on the hard grades, and
trying to placate Eleanor by keeping a hand on Lion's bridle, so that
she might feel sure he wouldn't run away. When at last, rather blown and
perspiring, they reached the camp, Eleanor got out of the wagon and said
she wanted to "help"; but Edith, still contrite about the "thread,"
said: "Not I'm not going to have you hurt your lovely hands!" In the
late afternoon, having saved Eleanor's hands in every possible way, she
left them, and thinking, without the slightest rancor, of the rough
bliss she was not asked to share, went running down the mountain with
Rover at her heels.

Eleanor, wondering at her willingness to take that long road home with
only the lumbering old dog for company, was intensely glad to have her
go.

"Girls of that age are so uninteresting," she told Maurice; "and now
we'll be all by ourselves!"

"Yes; Adam and Eve," he said; "and twilight; and the world spread out
like a garden! Do you see that glimmer over there to the left? That's
the beginning of the river--our river!"

He had made her comfortable with some cushions piled against the trunk
of a tree, and lighted a fire in a ring of blackened stones; then he
brought her her supper, and ate his own on his knees beside her,
watching eagerly for ways to serve her, laughing because she cringed
when, from an overhanging bough, a spider let himself down upon her
skirt, and hurrying to bring her a fresh cup of coffee, because an
unhappy ant had scalded himself to death in her first cup. Afterward he
would not let her "hurt her hands" by washing the dishes. When this was
over, and the dusk was deepening, he went into the woods to the
"lean-to" in which Lion was quartered, to see that the old horse was
comfortable, but a minute later came crashing back through the
underbrush, laughing, but provoked.

"That imp, Edith, didn't hitch him securely, and the old fellow has
walked home, if you please--!"

"Lion--gone? Oh, what shall we do?"

"Ill pull the wagon down when I want to go back for food."

"_Pull_ it?"

"Won't need much pulling! It will go down by itself. If I put you in it,
I'll have to rope a log on behind as a brake, or it would run over me! I
bet