"Well, I am not, Leila, if you mean that Uncle Jim was hard on me."
"Yes, he was, and I mean to tell him—I do."
"Please not." She said nothing in the way of reply, but only, "Let us go and see the spring."
"Well, come along."
They wandered far into the untouched forest. "Ah! here it is," she cried. A spring of water ran out from among the anchoring roots of a huge black spruce. He stood gazing down at it.
"Oh, Leila, isn't it wonderful?"
"Were you never here before, John?"
"No, never. It seems as if it was born out of the tree. No wonder this spruce grew so tall and strong. How cold it must keep the old fellow's toes."
"What queer ideas you have, John." She had not yet the gift of fancy, long denied to some in the emergent years of approaching womanhood. "I am tired, John," she said, as she dropped with hands clasped behind her head and hidden in the glorious abundance of darkening red hair, which lay around her on the brown pine-needles like the disordered aureole of some careless-minded saint.
John said, "It is this terrible heat. I never before heard you complain of being tired."