Dazed, silenced, a trifle faint, she turned from him blindly.
"Please," she whispered, in the ghost of a voice; and he released her.
For a few moments she stood resting against the fir-tree, her left arm across her eyes, frightened, motionless.
The forest was very still around her, as though every leaf were listening.
CHAPTER XVII
HER FIRST CAMPAIGN
"Karen," she heard him say, in a constrained and unfamiliar voice, "I love you."
If he thought he was still speaking to the same girl whose soft and fragrant lips he had touched a moment before, he was mistaken. He spoke too late. The girl had vanished with her girlhood.