"Let me have your hand," he said.
Maud Barrington gave it to him, and hoped the curious little thrill that ran through her when his hard fingers closed upon her palm did not communicate itself to him. She also noticed that he moved his head sharply a moment, and then looked straight in front again. Then the birches seemed to fall away beneath them, and they moved out across the dim gully with the loosely-laid planking rattling under their feet, until they came to a strip scarcely three feet wide which spanned a gulf of blackness in the shadow of the trees.
"Hold fast!" said Winston, with a trace of hoarseness. "You are sure you feel quite steady?"
"Of course!" said the girl, with a little laugh, though she recognized the anxiety in his voice, and felt his hand close almost cruelly on her own. She was by no means timorous, and still less fanciful, but when they moved out into the blackness that closed about them above and beneath along the slender strip of swaying timber she was glad of the masterful grip. It seemed in some strange fashion portentous, for she felt that she would once more be willing to brave unseen perils, secure only in his guidance. What he felt she did not know, and was sensible of an almost overwhelming curiosity, until when at last well-stiffened timber lay beneath them, she contrived to drop a glove just where the moonlight smote the bridge. Winston stooped, and his face was clear in the silvery light when he rose again. Maud Barrington saw the relief in it, and compelled by some influence stood still looking at him with a little glow behind the smile in her eyes. A good deal was revealed to both of them in that instant, but the man dare not admit it, and was master of himself.
"Yes," he said, very simply, "I am glad you are across."
Maud Barrington laughed. "I scarcely fancy the risk was very great, but tell me about the bridge," she said. "You are living beside it?"
"Yes," said Winston. "In a tent. I must have it finished before harvest, you see!"
The girl understood why this was necessary, but deciding that she had on other occasions ventured sufficiently far with that topic, moved on across the bridge.
"A tent," she said, "cannot be a very comfortable place to live in, and who cooks for you?"
Winston smiled dryly. "I am used to it, and can do all the cooking that is necessary," he said. "It is the usual home for the beginner, and I lived six months in one--on grindstone bread, the tinctured glucose you are probably not acquainted with as 'drips,' and rancid pork--when I first came out to this country and hired myself, for ten dollars monthly, to another man. It is a diet one gets a little tired of occasionally, but after breaking prairie twelve hours every day one can eat almost anything, and when I afterwards turned farmer my credit was rarely good enough to provide the pork."