When the birds fly south

by Stanton A. Coblentz

"No, not father! He's very, very good to me, of course, but he's like all the men—imagines that the great god of the flowering spring, and the god of the ripening fall, who put women into the world, had only one use for them. And he thinks I'm growing old enough to—"

Abruptly Yasma halted, as though she feared to tread on unsafe ground. Her fingers still fumbled among the dead leaves, while her averted eyes searched the dense, dark masses of foliage as if in pursuit of something elusive and much desired.

"But I've told you enough about myself," she resumed, hastily, in a half whisper. "Now it's your turn to speak about yourself."

Though I would have done all I could to please her, I was still at a loss for a reply. Embarrassed at my own speechlessness after her frank recital, I wasted much time in telling her that I really had nothing to tell.

"Oh, yes, you must have," she insisted, almost with a child's assurance, as she looked up at me with candid great brown eyes. "What friends had you before you came here? Had you any family? Were you always alone, as I was? Or were there many people around you?"

"Yes, there were many people," I declared, hesitatingly, "though no one who was close of kin, and no one who was such a comrade to me as you have been, Yasma. No, never anyone at all. I did not have any lovely young girl to help me and be kind to me and go romping into the woods with me for nuts and berries."

I paused, and noted that Yasma sat with eyes still averted, still gazing into the shadowy thickets as if she saw there something that interested her immensely. And as I peered at the delicately modelled features, the sensitive nostrils and lips and the auburn hair heaped over the rose-tinged cheeks, I seemed to detect there a wistfulness I had never noticed before, an indefinable melancholy that made her appear no longer the dashing, tumultuous daughter of the wilderness, but rather a small and pathetic creature pitifully in need of comfort and protection. And at this thought—purely fanciful though it may have been—my mind was flooded with sentiments such as I had not known for years. Spontaneously, as though by instinct, my hand reached out for hers, which did not resist, and yet did not return my pressure; and my lips phrased sentiments which certainly my reason would have countermanded if reason had had time to act.

"You don't know what a beautiful girl you are, Yasma," I heard myself repeating the old commonplace of lovers. "What a rare, beautiful girl! I have never known anyone—never—"

"Come, let us not talk of such things!" Yasma cut me short. And she leapt to her feet with a return of her former animation. "See! the sunset shadows are already deepening! In another hour the woods will be cold and dark!"

Again the impetuous wild thing, she seized one of the bags of nuts before I had had time to stop her, and went darting off before me along the forest track, while I was left to follow slowly in a sober mood.