"Perhaps I have some occult reason for wishing to win your good opinion," he suggested.
For the second time she staved off a personal drift in the conversation. "It's getting darker," she said, looking about with sudden concern.
"Don't say you must be going, Miss Wycliffe," he begged. "This is the very best part of the day. Let me light a fire of pine cones." He started up and stood before her, anticipating her acquiescence. She nodded her approval graciously, and at that moment the setting sun, struggling through the trees, shone full across her face and illumined her eyes. In this clear glow they were no longer black, but brown as the brown velvet of her jacket. He was haunted by a sense of a duplicated experience, and then remembered the fragile girl sitting on the stone step with her basket of eggs in her lap. But Miss Wycliffe's colouring was glorified, rather than penetrated, by the sun's rays, enriched rather than absorbed. Her face, framed in a large hat faced underneath with a delicate tint of blue chiffon, seemed to look out at him as from an inverted sea-shell, and the picture arrested him on the point of going. As if she suspected the cause of his delay and intended to break the charm, she removed the hat deftly and placed it with her gloves beside her.
"I think a fire would be pleasant," she remarked, "though it is really as warm as summer."
She had changed the picture only to improve it, for the suggestion of wildness and freedom in her dark hair fitted more perfectly with the spirit of the twilight woods. It may be that only a man can understand the fascination that exists for men in just such a simple operation as she had performed. The absolute femininity of it, the fumbling for the hatpins, the deliberate and thoughtful reinserting of them afterward in the discarded hat, where they can be found when needed, the invariable smoothing back of the hair from brow and eyes,—all these things make their peculiar appeal. It was this that caused Leigh to smile as he turned away and went in search of fuel, whistling softly to himself. Returning with his hat well filled with pine cones, he caught sight of her face before she noted his approach, and was struck, as once before, by her expression of immeasurable sadness. She sat, as at first, embracing her knees with her hands, her nether lip drawn in as if she would suppress a sigh, her eyes fixed upon the distance and shadowed by something of the solemnity of the coming night.
As the light flames shot suddenly up from the heap of cones, their brilliancy made the surrounding woods seem vast and dark, the more so as the sun had now sunk behind the hill across the stream, filling the woods in that quarter with a glow as from another fire. He fed the flames thoughtfully with bits of broken branches, talking somewhat at random about a camping trip in the Yosemite.
"Isn't it absurd," she said presently, "that we have gradually lowered our voices till we are talking almost in whispers?"
"I mean to break the spell at once," he declared, and having made a trumpet with his hand, he hallooed loudly toward the west. The result was unexpected. A ghostly triple echo, which the lower tone of their earlier conversation had failed to elicit, answered him from the opposite shore. In broad daylight an echo will suggest mystery and a bodiless, impish mocker, even to an unimaginative mind, but now the effect was intensified tenfold by the silence and darkness that enclosed them like a wall.
"You may laugh," she said, "but I don't wonder that primitive peoples imagined a haunted nature. I 'm an absolute Pagan this very moment. I believe in Pan and Echo and all the rest of them, and I don't like their company a bit."
"Have you noticed how silent it has grown all of a sudden?" he asked. "It seems only a few minutes ago that we heard the crows cawing in the branches, and the woods were full of small noises of squirrels and birds."