"Come, Thor!" He turned and left her, his great dog at his heels, going up the narrowing cañon.
"I'll not spy on you!" he called back, when he had gone a hundred yards. "You'll hear me shouting to you well before I come within eye-shot."
And then she lost him, gone among the lesser, denser trees thick about the creek's margins.
She turned her back on the grotto of his choosing, and went out into the full sunlight. She found a spot in the open, ringed about by the majestic pines, a grassy sward with the cleaving silver line of the creek cutting across it. For the first time in hours ... how many endless hours? how many days?... she was alone! No man at her side, either protecting or dominating. Her lungs filled with a deep sigh. Alone and secure in her aloneness for a matter of several hours.
There was a certain singing happiness, electric within her, and it sprang, bright-winged, from her own characteristic pride. Bruce Standing had left her to an absolute physical freedom, knowing her bound by that intangible and unbreakable bond of her promise. He, a man who did not break his own word knew her for a girl who did not break hers! And he knew, at last, that it had not been her hand that had fired that cowardly shot.
"It was cruel ... to have laughed at him. I did not mean to laugh. Would to God...."
But if she had not laughed? Then what? Then how much of her adventure would have followed? How much of it did she, after all, regret?... She fell to wondering dreamily on Babe Deveril. Where was he? And would she see him again? And, if she should see him....
A thousand riddles and, as always, no answer to the riddles which spring from eternity. Only the merry voice of the purling creek to talk back to her, that and the rustling whisper ebbing and flowing through the pine tops. The stream, like a companionable human voice, called to her insistently. She rose and went down to it and stooped to drink; she bathed her hands and arms and face. How lonely it was here! She cast a quick glance up-stream; long ago Standing, with his big dog at his heels, had passed out of sight. And he had given her gage of promise for promise given ... he would send his shouting voice ahead of him before he came back....
So she bathed fearlessly, watched only by the solitudes, guarded by their sombre depths; she plunged, with a little shivery gasp, into the deep, cool pool below the slithering waterfall; the water slipped, gleaming like a bejewelled film over her pure-white body, making it rosy when she emerged, like rose petals.... She dressed in furious haste, all ablush and yet steeped in a confident knowledge that no eye, save the bright eye of a curious brown bird, had seen. She felt new-born; refreshed beyond belief. She ran back up the bank and sat down in the very spot where she had dropped first when Standing had left her. She began, always hurrying, to comb out her hair with her fingers. Sitting there in the open she let it sun....