"But what am I to do——?"

"Fight 'em off. Bite 'em. Kick their shins. . . . Oh, Lord," groaned Johnny, dexterously whirling her about, "there's another coming. . . . Here's where we go. This way out."

Speedily he piloted her through the throng. Masterfully he caught her arm and drew her out of doors.

She was glad to be out of the dance. His clasp had been growing too personal . . . too tight. . . . Perhaps she was only oddly self-conscious . . . incapable of the serene detachment of those other dancers, who, yielding and intertwined, revolved in intimate harmony.

There was a moon. It shone soft and bright upon them, making a world of enchantment. The long lines of the mountains melted together like a violet cloud and above them a round top floated, pale and dreamy, as the dome of Saint Peter's at twilight.

From the terrace stretched a grassy path where other couples were strolling and Johnny Byrd guided her past them. They walked in silence. He kept his hand on her arm and from time to time glanced about at her in a half-constraint that was no part of his usual air.

At a curve of the path the girl drew definitely back.

"Ah no——"

"Oh, why not? Isn't it the custom?" He laughed over the often-cited phrase but absently. His eyes had a warm, hurrying look in them that rooted her feet the more stubbornly to the ground.

"Decidedly not." She turned a merriment lighted face to him. "To walk alone with a young man—between dances—beneath the moon!"

Maria Angelina shuddered and cast impish eyes at heaven.

"Honestly?" Johnny demanded. "Do you mean to tell me you've never walked between dances with young men?"

"I tell you that I have never even danced with a young man until——" She flashed away from that memory. "Until I came to America. I am not yet in Italian society. I have never been presented. It is not yet my time."

"But—but don't the sub debs have any good times over there? Don't you have dances of your own? Don't you meet fellows? Don't you know anybody?" Johnny demanded with increasing amazement at each new shake of her head.

"Oh, come," he protested. "You can't put that over me. I'll bet you've got a bagful of fellows crazy about you. Don't you ever slip out on an errand, you know, and find some one waiting round the corner——?"

"You are speaking of the customs of my maid, perhaps," said Maria Angelina with becoming young haughtiness. "For myself, I do not go upon errands. I have never been upon the streets alone."

Johnny Byrd stared. With a supreme effort of credulity he envisaged the fact. Perhaps it was really so. Perhaps she was just as sequestered and guileless and inexperienced as that. It was ridiculous. It was amusing. It was—somehow—intriguing.

With his hand upon her bare arm he drew her closer.

"Ri-Ri—honest now—is this the first——?"

She drew away instinctively before the suppressed excitement of him. Her heart beat fast; her hands were very cold. She knew elation . . . and panic . . . and dread and hope.

It was for this she had come. Young and rich and free! What more would Mamma ask? What greater triumph could be hers?

"I'd like to make a lot of other things the first, too," muttered Johnny.

To Ri-Ri it seemed irrevocable things were being said. But she still held lightly away from him, resisting the clumsy pull of his arm. He hesitated—laughed oddly.

"It ought to be against the law for any girl to look the way you do, Ri-Ri." He laughed again. "I wonder if you know how the deuce you do look?"

"Perhaps it is the moonlight, Signor."

"Moonlight—you look as if you were made of it. . . . I could eat you up, Ri-Ri." His eyes on her red little mouth, on her white, beating throat. His voice had an odd, husky note.

"Don't be such a little frost, Ri-Ri. Don't you like me at all?"

It was the dream coming true. It was the fairy prince—not the false figure she had set in the prince's place, but a proud revenge upon him. This was reality, fulfillment.

She saw herself already married to Johnny, returning proudly with him to Italy. She saw them driving in a victoria, openly as man and wife—or no, Johnny would have a wonderful car, all metal and bright color. They would be magnificently touring, with their luggage strapped on the side, as she had seen Americans.

She saw them turning into the sombre courtway of the old Palazzo Santonini and, so surely had she been attuned to the American note, she could presage Johnny's blunt disparagement. He would be astonished that they were living upon the third floor—with the lower apartment let. He would be amused at the servants toiling up the stairs from the kitchens to the dining hall. He would be entertained at the solitary tub. He would be disgusted, undoubtedly, at the candles. . . .

But of course Mamma would have everything very beautiful. There would be no lack of candles. . . . The chandeliers would be sparkling for that dinner. There would be delicious food, delicate wines, an abundant gleam of shining plate and crystal and embroidered linens.

And how Lucia would stare, how dear Julietta would smile! She would buy Julietta the prettiest clothes, the cleverest hats. . . . She would give dear Mamma gold—something that neither dear Papa nor Francisco knew about—and to dear Papa and Francisco she would give, too, a little gold—something that dear Mamma did not know about.

For once Papa could have something for his play that was not a roast from his kitchen nor clothes from his daughters' backs nor oats from his horses!

Probably they would be married at once. Johnny was free and rich—and impatient. She did not suspect him of interest in a long wooing or betrothal. . . . And while she must appear to be in favor of a return home, first, and a marriage from her home, the American ceremony would cut many knots for her—save much expense at home. . . .

She saw herself proudly exhibiting Johnny, delighting in his youth, his blonde Americanism, his smartly cut clothes, his conqueror's assurance.

Meanwhile Maria Angelina was still standing there in the moonlight, like a little wraith of silver, smiling with absent eyes at Johnny's muttered words, withdrawing, in childish panic, from Johnny's close pressing ardor. She knew that if he persisted . . . but before her soft detachment, her half laughing evasiveness of his mood, he did not persist. He seemed oddly struggling with some withholding uncertainties of his own.

"Oh, well, if that's all you like me," said Johnny grumpily.

It was reprieve . . . reprieve to the irrevocable things. Her heart danced . . . and yet a piqued resentment pinched her.

He had been able to resist.

She knew subtly that she could have overcome that irresolution. . . . But she was not going to make things too easy for him—her Santonini pride forbade!

"We must go back," she told him and exulted in his moodiness.

And for the rest of the evening his arm pressed her, his eyes smiled down significantly upon her, and when she confronted the great mirror again it was to glimpse a girl with darkly shining eyes and cheeks like scarlet poppies, a girl in white, like a bride, and with a bride's high pride and assured heart.

She slept, that night, composing the letter to dear Mamma.



CHAPTER VI

TWO—AND A MOUNTAIN

The next morning was given to recovery from the dance. In the afternoon the Martins had planned a mountain climb. It was not a really bad mountain, at all, and the arrangement was to start in the late afternoon, have dinner upon the top, and descend by moonlight.

It was the plan of the younger inexhaustibles among the group, but in spite of faint protests from some of the elders all the Martin house-party was in line for the climb, and with the addition of the Blair party and several other couples from the Lodge, quite a procession was formed upon the path by the river.

It was a lovely day—a shade too hot, if anything was to be urged against it. The sun struck great shafts of golden light amid the rich green of the forest, splashing the great tree boles with bold light and shade. The air was fragrant with spruce and pine and faint, aromatic wintergreen. A hot little wind rocked the reflections in the river and blew its wimpling surface into crinkled, lace-paper fantasies.

Overhead the sky burned blue through the white-cottonballs of cloud.

Bob Martin headed the procession, Ruth at his side, and the stout widower concluded it, squiring a rather heavy-footed Mrs. Martin. Midway in the line came Mrs. Blair, and beside her, abandoning the line of young people behind the immediate leaders was a small figure in short white skirt and middy, pressing closely to her Cousin Jane's side.

It was Maria Angelina, her dark hair braided as usual about her head, her eyes a shade downcast and self-conscious, withdrawn and tight-wrapped as any prudish young bud.

But if virginal pride had urged her to flee all appearance of expectation, an equally sharp masculine reaction was withholding Johnny Byrd from any appearance of pursuit.

He went from group to group, clowning it with jokes and laughter, and only from the corners of his eyes perceiving that small figure, like a child's in its white play clothes.

For half an hour that separation endured—a half hour in which Cousin Jane told Maria Angelina all about her first mountain climb, when a girl, and the storm that had driven herself and her sister and her father and the guide to sleep in the only shelter, and of the guide's snores that were louder than the thunder—and Maria Angelina laughed somehow in the right places without taking in a word, for all the time apprehension was tightening, tightening like a violin string about to snap.

And then, when it was drawn so tight that it did not seem possible to endure any more, Johnny Byrd appeared at Ri-Ri's side, conscious-eyed and boyishly embarrassed, but managing an offhand smile.

"And is this the very first mountain you've ever climbed?" he demanded banteringly.

Gladness rushed back into the girl. She raised a face that sparkled.

"The very first," she affirmed, very much out of breath. "That is, upon the feet. In Italy we go up by diligence and there is always a hotel at the top for tea."

"We'll have a little old bonfire at the top for tea. . . . Don't take it so fast and you'll be all right," he advised, and, laying a restraining hand upon her arm he held her back while Cousin Jane, with her casual, careless smile, passed ahead to join one of the Martin party.

It was an act of masterful significance. Maria Angelina accepted it meekly.

"Like this?" asked Johnny of her smiling face.

"I love it," she told him, and looked happily at the green woods about them, and across the river, rushing now, to where the forest was clinging to sharply rising mountain flanks. Her eyes followed till they found the bare, shouldering peaks outlined against the blue and white of the cumulous sky.

The beauty about her flooded the springs of happiness. It was a wonderful world, a radiant world, a world of dream and delights. It was a world more real than the fantasy of moonlight. She felt more real. She was herself, too, not some strange, diaphanous image conjured out of tulle and gauze, she was her own true flesh-and-blood self, living in a dream that was true.

She looked away from the mountains and smiled up at Johnny Byrd very much as the young princess in the fairy tale must have smiled at the all-conquering prince, and Johnny Byrd's blue eyes grew bluer and brighter and his voice dropped into intimate possessiveness.

It didn't matter in the least what they talked about. They were absurdly merry, loitering behind the procession.

Suddenly it occurred to Maria Angelina that it had been some time since he had drawn her back from Cousin Jane's casual but comprehending smile, some time since they had even heard the echo of voices ahead.

Her conscience woke guiltily.

"We must hurry," she declared, quickening her own small steps.

Teasingly Johnny Byrd hung back. "'Fraid cat, 'fraid cat—what you 'fraid of, Maria Angelina?"

He added, "I'm not going to eat you—though I'd like to," he finished in lower tone.

"But it is getting dark! There are clouds," said the girl, gazing up in frank surprise at the changed sky. She had not noticed when the sunlight fled. It was still visible across the river, slipping over a hill's shoulder, but from their woods it was withdrawn and a dark shadow was stretching across them.

"Clouds—what do you care for clouds?" scoffed Johnny gayly, and in his rollicking tenor, "Just roll dem clouds along," sang he.

Politely Maria Angelina waited until he had finished the song, but she waited with an uneasy mind.

She cared very much for clouds. They looked very threatening, blowing so suddenly over the mountain top, overcasting the brightness of the way. And behind the scattered white were blowing gray ones, their edges frayed like torn clothes on a line, and after the gray ones loomed a dark, black one, rushing nearer.

And suddenly the woods at their right began to thresh about, with a surprised rustling, and a low mutter, as of smothered warning, ran over the shoulder of the mountain.

"Rain! As sure as the Lord made little rain drops," said Johnny unconcerned. "There's going to be a cloudful spilled on us," he told the troubled girl, "but it won't last a moment. Come into the wood and find the dry side of a tree."

He caught at her hand and brought her crashing through the underbrush, pushing through thickets till they were in the center of a great group of maples, their heavy boughs spread protectingly above.

A giant tree trunk protected her upon one side; upon the other Johnny drew close, spreading his sweater across her shoulders. Looking upwards, Maria Angelina could not see the sky; above and about her was soft greenness, like a fairy bower. And when the rain came pouring like hail upon the leaves scarcely a drop won through to her.

They stood very still, unmoving, unspeaking while the shower fell. There was an unreal dreamlike quality about the happening to the girl. Then, almost intrusively, she became deeply aware of his presence there beside her—and conscious that he was aware of hers.

She shivered.

"Cold," said Johnny, in a jumpy voice, and put a hand on her shoulders, guarded by his sweater.

"N-no," she whispered.

"Feel dry?"

His hand moved upward to her bared head, lingered there upon the heavy braids.

"Yes," she told him, faintly as before.

"But you're shivering."

"I don't like t-thunder," she told him absurdly, as a muttering roll shook the air above them.

His hand, still hovering over her hair, went down against her cheek and pressed her to him. She could hear his heart beating. It sounded as loudly in his breast as her own. She had a sense of sudden, unpremeditated emotion.

She felt his lips upon the back of her neck.

She tried to draw away, and suddenly he let her go and gave a short, unsteady laugh.

"It's all right, Ri-Ri—you're my little pal, aren't you?" he murmured.

Unseeingly she nodded, drawing a long, shaken breath. Then as he started to draw her nearer again she moved away, putting up her arms to her hair in a gesture that instinctively shielded the confusion of her face.

"No? . . . All right, Ri-Ri, I won't crowd you," he murmured. "But oh, you little Beauty Girl, you ought to be in a cage with bars about. . . . You ought to wear a mask—a regular diving outfit——"

Unexpectedly Ri-Ri recovered her self-possession. Again she fled from the consummation of the scene.

"I shall wear nothing so unbecoming," she flung lightly back. "And it has not been raining for ever so long. Unless you wish to build a nest in the forest, like a new fashion of oriole, Signor Byrd, you had better hurry and catch up with the others."

Johnny did not speak as they came out of the woods and in silence they hurried along the path on the river's edge.

The sun came out again to light them; on the green leaves about them the wetness glittered and dried and the ephemeral shower seemed as unreal as the memory it evoked.

With her head bent Maria Angelina pressed on in a haste that grew into anxiety. Not a sound came back to them from those others ahead. Not a voice. Not a footstep.

And presently the path appeared dying under their feet.

Green moss overspread it. Brambles linked arms across it.

"They are not here. We are on the wrong way," cried Maria Angelina and turned startled eyes on the young man.

Johnny Byrd refused to take alarm.

"They must have crossed the river farther back—that's the answer," he said easily. "We went past the right crossing—probably just after the storm. You know you were speeding like a two-year-old on the home stretch."

But Ri-Ri refused to shoulder all that blame.

"It might have been before the storm—while we were lingering so," she urged distressfully. "You know that for so long we had heard nothing—we ought to go back quickly—very quickly and find that crossing."

Johnny did not look back. He looked across the river, which ran more deeply here between narrowed banks, and then glanced on ahead.

"Oh, we'll go ahead and cross the next chance we get," he informed her. "We can strike in from there to old Baldy. I know the way. . . . Trust your Uncle Leatherstocking," he told her genially.

But no geniality appeased Maria Angelina's deepening sense of foreboding.

She quickened her steps after him as he strode on ahead, gallantly holding back brambles for her and helping her scramble over fallen logs, and she assented, with the eagerness of anxiety, when he announced a place as safe for crossing.

It was at the head of a mild rush of rapids, and an outcropping of large rocks made possible, though slippery, stepping-stones.

But Ri-Ri's heelless shoes were rubber soled, and she was both fearless and alert. And though the last leap was too long for her, for she landed in the shallows with splashing ankles, she had scarcely a down glance for them. Her worried eyes were searching the green uplands before them.

Secretly she was troubled at Johnny's instant choice of way. Her own instinct was to go back along the river and then strike in towards old Baldy, but men, she knew from Papa, did not like objections to their wisdom, so she reminded herself that she was a stranger and ignorant of this country and that Johnny Byrd knew his mountains.

He told her, as they went along, how well he knew them.

Steadily their path climbed.

"Should we not wind back a little?" she ventured once.

"Oh, we're on another path—we'll dip back and meet the other path a little higher up," the young man told her.

But still the path did not dip back. It reached straight up. But Johnny would not abandon it. He seemed to feel it inextricably united with his own rightness of decision, and since he was inevitably right, so inevitably the path must disclose its desired character.

But once or twice he paused and looked out over the way. Then, hopefully, Ri-Ri hung upon his expression, longing for reconsideration. But he never faltered, always on her approach he charged ahead again.

No holding back of brambles, now. No helping over logs. Johnny was the pathfinder, oblivious, intent, and Ri-Ri, the pioneer woman, enduring as best she might.

Up he drove, straight up the mountain side, and after him scrambled the girl, her fears voiceless in her throat, her heart pounding with exertion and anxiety like a ship's engine in her side.

Time seemed interminable. There was no sun now. The gray and white clouds were spread thinly over the sky and only a diffused brightness gave the suggestion of the west.

When the path wound through woods it seemed already night. On barren slopes the day was clear again.

Hours passed. Endless hours to the tired-footed girl. They had left the last woods behind them now and reached a clearing of bracken among the granite, and here Johnny Byrd stopped, and stared out with an unconcealed bewilderment that turned her hopes to lead.

With him, she stared out at the great gray peaks closing in about them without recognizing a friend among them. Dim and unfamiliar they loomed, shrouded in clouds, like chilly giants in gray mufflers against the damp.

It was not old Baldy. It could not be old Baldy. One looked up at old Baldy from the Lodge and she had heard that from old Baldy one looked down upon the Lodge and the river and the opening valley. She had been told that from old Baldy the Martin chalet resembled a cuckoo clock. . . .

No cuckoo clocks in those vague sweeps below.

"Can we not go down a little bit?" said Maria Angelina gently. "Farther down again we might find the right path. . . . Up here—I think we are on the wrong mountain."

Turning, Johnny looked about. Ahead of him were overhanging slabs of rock.

Irresolution vanished. "That's the top now," he declared. "We are just coming up the wrong side, that's all. I'll say it's wrong—but here we are. I'll bet the others are up there now—lapping up that food. Come on, Ri-Ri, we haven't far now to go."

In a gust of optimism he held out his hand and Maria Angelina clutched it with a weariness courage could not conceal.

It seemed to her that her breath was gone utterly, that her feet were leaden weights and her muscles limply effortless. But after him she plunged, panting and scrambling up the rocks, and then, very suddenly, they found themselves to be on only a plateau and the real mountain head reared high and aloof above.

Under his breath—and not particularly under it, either—Johnny Byrd uttered a distinct blasphemy.

And in her heart Maria Angelina awfully seconded it.

Then with decidedly assumed nonchalance, "Gosh! All that way to supper!" said the young man. "Well, come on, then—we got to make a dent in this."

"Oh, are you sure—are you sure that this is the right mountain?" Maria Angelina begged of him.

"Don't I know Baldy?" he retorted. "We're just on another side of it from the others, I told you. Come on, Ri-Ri—we'll soon smell the coffee boiling."

She wished he had not mentioned coffee. It put a name to that gnawing, indefinite feeling she had been too intent to own.

Coffee . . . Fragrant and steaming, with bread and butter . . . sandwiches filled with minced ham, with cream cheese, with olive paste—sandwiches filled with anything at all! Cold chicken . . . salad . . . fruit. Food in any form! Food!!

She felt empty. Utterly empty and disconsolate.

And she was tired. She had never known such tiredness—her feet ached, her legs ached, her back ached, her arms ached. She could have dropped with the achingness of her. Each effort was a punishment.

Yet she went on with a feverish haste. She was driven by a compulsion to which fatigue was nothing.

It had become terrible not to be reunited with the others. She thought of the hours, the long hours, that she and Johnny Byrd had been alone and she flinched, shivering under the whiplash of fear.

What were they saying of her, those others? What were they thinking?

She knew how unwarrantable, how inexcusable a thing she had done.

It had begun with deliberate loitering. For that—for a little of that—she had the sanction of the new American freedom, the permission of Cousin Jane's casual, understanding smile.

"It's all right," that smile had seemed to say to her, "it's all right as long as it's Johnny Byrd—but be careful, Ri-Ri."

And she had loitered shamefully, she had plunged into the woods with Johnny in that thunder storm, she had let him take her on the wrong path.

And now it was growing dark and they were far from the others—and she was not sure, even, that they were upon the right way.

But they must be. They could not be so hideously, so finally wrong.

Panic routed her exhaustion and she toiled furiously on.

"You're a pretty good scout—for a little Wop," said Johnny Byrd with a sudden grin and a moment's brightness was lighted within her.

She did not speak—she could only breathe hard and smile.

Nearer and nearer they gained the top, rough climbing but not dangerous. The top was not far now. Johnny shouted and listened, then shouted again.

Once they thought they heard voices but it was only the echoes of their own, borne hollowly back.

"The wind is the other way," said Johnny, and on they went, charging up a steep, gravelly slope over more rocks and into a scrub group of firs. . . .

Surely this was as near the top as one could go! Nothing above but barren, tilted rock. Nothing beyond but more boulders and stunted trees. The place lay bare before their eyes.

Round and round they went, calling, holding their breath to listen. Then, with a common impulse, they turned and stared at each other.

That moment told Maria Angelina what panic was.



CHAPTER VII

JOHNNY BECOMES INEVITABLE

She did not speak. She was afraid she was going to burst into tears. Her knees were trembling and she sat down with the effect of collapse and looked mutely up at Johnny.

"Judas," said Johnny bitterly.

He stared around once more, evading her eyes now, and then he moved over and sat down beside her, drawing out his cigarettes.

Slowly he took one, tapped its end upon a rock, and lighted it. Then, the case still open, he looked inquiringly at her.

"Smoke, Ri-Ri?" he questioned. "Ought to—never too late to learn."

She shook her head, smiling faintly. She knew his own perturbation must be immense. She did not want to add to it; she wanted to be brave and conceal her own agony.

He put the cigarettes away and from an inner pocket drew out a cake of chocolate.

"Supper," he announced.

She broke the cake in two even halves, giving him back one. He took but half of that. With the cigarette between his lips he felt better. Slowly he relaxed.

"I'll have to teach you how to smoke," he said, blowing rings. "When we're rested we'll get some wood and build a fire. The others will see that and signal back and we'll make connections."

At that she stared, round-eyed. "Wait for a fire?" Incredulously she straightened. Her voice grew breathless. "Oh, no, we must go—we must go," she said with a hint of wildness in her urgency.

Deliberately Johnny leaned back. "Go? Go where?"

"Go down. Go to where the others are. We must find them."

"Nothing doing." Johnny rubbed a stout leg. "Your Uncle Dudley is all in. So are you."

"But I can go, I am able to go on," she insisted. "And I would rather—Oh, if you please, I would so much rather go on at once. We cannot wait like this."

"I'll say we can wait like this. Watch me."

"But we cannot stay——"

"Well, we cannot go," said Johnny mimicking. "We'd get nowhere if we did try. We'd just go round and round. Our best bet is to stay on this peak and signal. Believe me, I'm not going to stir for one long while."

Again the fear of tears choked back the words that rushed upon her. She told herself that she must not be weak and frantic and make a scene. . . . Men abhorred scenes. And it would not help. It would only anger him. He was tired now. He was not thinking of her. He had not realized the situation.

Presently he would realize. . . . And, anyway, he was there with her, he would take care of her, protect her from the tongues of gossip.

Slowly Johnny smoked two cigarettes, then he rose and gathered sticks for a fire. It burned briskly, its swift flame throwing a glowing circle about them and extinguishing the rest of the world.

There had been no sunset. A bank of clouds had swallowed the last vestige of ruddy light. The mountain peaks darkened. It was growing night.

"We'll wait for moonlight," said Johnny Byrd.

But at that Maria Angelina's eyes came away from those mountains which she was unremittingly watching for an answering fire and fixed themselves upon his face in startled horror.

"Moonlight!" she gasped. "But no—no! We must not wait any more. It is too late now. We must get down as soon as we can."

"Why, you little baby!" Johnny Byrd moved nearer to her. "What you 'fraid of, Ri-Ri? We can't help how late it is, can we?"

He put an arm about her and drew her gently close, and because she was so tired and frightened and upset Maria Angelina could no longer resist the tears that came blinding her eyes.

"You little baby!" said Johnny again softly, and suddenly she felt his kiss upon her cheek.

"Poor little Ri-Ri! Poor tired little girl!"

"Oh, you must not. Signor, you must not."

"Signor," he said reproachfully.

"J-Johnny," she choked.

"That's better. . . . All right, I'll be good, Ri-Ri. Just sit still. And I'll be good."

But firmly he kept his arm about her and soon her tense little figure relaxed in that strong clasp. She was not frightened, as last night at the dance, she felt utterly forlorn and comforted by his strength.

They sat very still, unspeaking in that silent embrace, and about them it grew colder and darker while the sky seemed to grow thinner and grayer and clear. And at last against the pallor of the sky, mountain after mountain lifted itself out of the shadowy cloud mass, and peak after peak defined itself, stretching on and on like an army of giants.

Then the ridges grew blacker again, and back of one edge a sharp flare of light flamed, and a blood red disc of a moon came pushing furiously up into the sky, flinging down a transforming radiance.

In the valley the silvery birches gleamed like wood nymphs against the ebony firs.

Beauty had touched the world again. A long breath came fluttering from the girl's lips; she felt strangely solaced and comforted. After all, it was Johnny with her . . . the fairy prince. Her dreams were coming true . . . even under the shadow of this tragedy.

Again she felt his lips upon her cheek and now he was trying to turn her head towards him. Mutely she resisted, drawing away, but his force increased. She closed her eyes; she felt his kiss upon her hair, her cheek, the corner of her unstirring mouth.

And she thought that it was his right—if she turned from him she would seem strangely refusing. An American, she knew, kissed his fiancee freely.

But it was a tremendous freedom. . . .

It would have been—knightlier, she thought quiveringly, if he had not done that, if he had revealed a more respectful homage.

But these were American ways . . . and he was a man and he loved her and he wanted to feel that she belonged to him utterly. It was comfort for her troubled spirit.

But when she felt his hand trying to turn up her chin, so that her young lips might meet his, she slipped decidedly away.

"No? All right." Johnny gave a short, uncertain laugh. "All right, little girl, I'll be good."

She had risen to her feet and he rose now and his voice changed to a heartier note.

"Ready for the going? We'll have to make a start, I suppose. I don't see any rescue expeditions starting this way. . . . Lordy, I'm a starved man! I could eat the side of a house."

"I could eat the other side," said Maria Angelina smiling shakily.

Johnny put out the fire, ground out its embers beneath his heels, and started down upon the trail that they had come. Closely after him came the girl. The moonlight flooded the mountain side with vague, uncertain light and the descent was a difficult and dangerous matter.

They tripped over rocks; they stumbled through underbrush. The moon was their only clue to direction and the moon seemed to be slipping past the peaks at a confusing speed.

"We're going down anyway," said Johnny Byrd grimly.

Sharply they were stopped. The ledge on which they found themselves ended abruptly, like a bluff, and peering over its edge they looked down into the dark tops of tall fir trees.

No more descent there.

In disgusted rage Johnny strode up and down the length of that ledge but it was a clear shelf, with no way out from it except the way that they had come. There was no approach from below.

"And some fools go in for mountaineering!" said Johnny Byrd bitterly.

It was the last gust of humor in him. He was furious—and he grew more furious unrestrainedly. He exploded in muttered oaths and exclamations.

In her troubled little heart Maria Angelina felt for him. She knew that he was tired and hungry, and men, when they were hungry, were very unhappy. But she was tired and hungry, too—and her reputation, the reputation that was her very existence, was in jeopardy.

Up they scrambled, from the ledge again, and once back upon the mountain side, they circled farther back around the mountain before starting down again.

Blindly Maria Angelina followed Johnny's lead. She tripped over roots; she caught upon brambles. With her last shreds of vanity she was grateful that he could not see her streaming hair and scratched and dirty face.

It had grown darker and darker and the moon had vanished utterly behind the clouds. The air was damp and cold. A wind was rising.

Suddenly their feet struck into the faint line of a path. Eagerly they followed. It wound on back across the mountain side and rounded a wooded spur.

"It will lead somewhere, anyway," declared Johnny, hope returning good nature to his tone.

"But it is not the right way," Maria Angelina combated in distress. "See, we are not going down any more. Oh, let us keep on going down until we find that river below, and then we can return to the Lodge——"

"You come on," said Johnny firmly, striding on ahead, and unhappily she followed, her anxiety warring with her weariness.

What time could it be? She felt as if it were the middle of the night. The picnickers must all be home by now, looking for her, organizing searching parties perhaps. . . . What must they think? What must they not think?

She saw her Cousin Jane's distress. . . . Ruth's disgust. Would they imagine that she had eloped?

She knew but little of American conventions and that little told her that the ceremonies were easy of accomplishment. Young people were always eloping. . . . The consent of guardians was not necessary. . . . How terrible, if they imagined her gone on a romantic elopement, to have her return, mud plastered, after a night with a young man upon the mountain!

A night upon the mountain with a young man . . . a young man in love with her.

Scandal. . . . Unbelievable shame.

She felt as if they were in the grip of a nightmare.

They must hurry, hurry. Somehow they must gain upon that night, they must return to the Lodge before it was too late.

A cold sprinkle of rain fell, plastering her middy shiveringly to her, but the rain soon stopped and the path grew clearer and more and more defined as they stumbled along it to its end.

It was not a house they found. It was not really a cabin. It was just three walls of logs built against the rocky face of the mountain.

But it was a hut, a shelter, with a door that swung open on leather hinges at Johnny's tug.

He called, then peered within. Finally he struck a match and stared about and Maria Angelina came to look, too. The place was so tiny that a bed of boughs and blankets on the floor covered most of the space, save for a few boxes. Outside the doors were the ashes of old fires.

"Well, it's something," said Johnny in glum resignation. "Hasn't the fool that built it any food?"

Vigorously he poked about the tiny place, then emerged to report in disgust, "Not a darn thing. . . . Oh, well, it's a shelter, anyway."

The incredible idea pierced Maria Angelina that he was going to pause there for rest.

"Oh, we must go on," she insisted.

"Go on?" He turned to stare in indignation at the girl who had gasped that at him. "Go on? In this dark? When it's going to rain? Why, you're nearly all in, now."

"Indeed—indeed, I am not all in," she protested. "It is not necessary for me to rest—not necessary at all. I am quite strong. I want only to go on—to go to the Lodge——"

"We'll never make the Lodge to-night. We'll have to camp here the best way we can."

It seemed to her that she could hardly have heard him. It was so incredible a thought—so overwhelming——

A queer gulping sound came from her throat. Her words fell without her volition, like spent breaths.

"But that is wrong. We cannot stay. We cannot stay like that——"

"Why can't we stay?"

"It—it is impossible! The scandal——"

Angrily he wheeled about. "Scandal?" he said sharply. "What the hell scandal is there?"

His indignation at the words could not dispel her terror. But it was something to have him so hot her champion.

"You know, they will all talk——"

"Let 'em talk," he said curtly. "We can't help it."

She put a hand to her throat as if to still that throbbing pulse there that impeded speech.

"I know we cannot help it. But we cannot—not give them so much to talk of. We can be trying to return——"

"Don't be a goose, Ri-Ri!" he broke in sharply.

He was a man. He did not understand the full agony. . . . Desperately Maria Angelina wondered as to her reception. She had no parallel in Italian society. The thing could not happen in Italian society. A girl, a well born girl, rambling the woods all night with her fiance!

She wondered if the announcement of their engagement instantly upon their return would appease the world. Of course, there would always be the story. As long as she lived there would be the story. But as Johnny's wife, triumphant, assured, she could afford to ignore it.

At her stillness Johnny had looked about, and something infinitely drooping and forlorn in the vague outlines of her small figure made its softening appeal.

His voice changed. "Don't you worry, little girl," he told her soothingly, "I'll take care of you."

Her heart leaped.

"Ah, yes," she said faintly, "but what can we do? Had it better be at once——?"

"At once——?"

"The marriage," she choked out.

"Marriage?" Even in the dimness she saw that he raised his head, his chin stiffening, his whole outline hardening.

"What are you talking about?" he said very roughly.

"About—about our marriage," she repeated trembling, and then, at something in his hardness and his grimness, "Why, what did you mean——? Must it not be soon?"

A dreadful, deliberate silence engulfed her words.

Coldly Johnny's slow voice broke it.

"Who said anything about marriage?" defiantly he demanded. "I never asked you to marry me."



CHAPTER VIII

JOHNNY BECOMES EXPLICIT

"I never asked you to marry me," he repeated very stiffly.

The crash of all her worlds sounded in Maria Angelina's ears. An aghast bewilderment flooded her soul.

Pitiably she stammered, "Why it—it was understood, was it not? You cared—you—you——"

She could not put into words the memories that beset her stricken consciousness. But the cheeks that had felt his kiss flamed with a sudden burning scarlet.

"What was understood?" said Johnny Byrd. "That I was going to marry you—because I kissed you?" And with that dreadful hostile grimness he insisted, "You knew darned well I wasn't proposing to you."

What did he mean? Had not every action of his been an affirmation of their relation? Did he believe she was one to whom men acted lightly? Had he never meant to propose to her, never meant to marry?

Last night at the dance—this afternoon in the woods—what had he meant by all his admiration and his boldness?

And that evening on the mountain, when, with his arm around her, he had murmured that he would take care of her. . . . Had he meant nothing by it, nothing, except the casual insolent intimacy which a man would grant a ballerina?

Or was he now turning from her in dreadful abandonment because after this scandal she would be too conspicuous to make it agreeable to carry out the intentions—perhaps only the vaguely realized intentions—of the past?

But why then, why had he kissed her on the mountain?

Utter terror beset her. Her voice shook so that the words dropped almost incoherently from the quivering lips.

"But if not—if not—Oh, you must know that now—now it is imperative!"

Shameful beseeching—shameful that she should have to beseech. Where was his manhood, his chivalry—where his compassion?

"Imperative nuts! You don't mean to say you're trying to make me marry you because we got lost in the woods?"

Desperately the girl struggled for dignity.

"It is the least you could do, Signor. Even if—if you had not cared——"

Her voice broke again.

"You little nut." Johnny's tones had altered. More mildly he went on, "I don't quite get you, Ri-Ri, and I don't think you get me. It isn't up to me to do any marrying, if that's honestly what's worrying you. And I'm not going to be stampeded, if that's what you're trying to do. . . . Our reputations will have to stand it."

And this, Maria Angelina despairingly recalled, was the man who had kissed her, had watched the moon rise with his arm about her, promising her his protection. . . . Wildly she wished that she had died before she had come to this—a thing lightly regarded and repudiated.

It was horrible to plead to him but the panic of her plight drove her on.

"Reputations!" she said chokingly. "Yours can stand it, perhaps—but what of me? You cannot be serious, you cannot! Why, it is my name, my life, my everything! . . . You made me come this way. Always I wanted you to go another way, but no, you were sure, you told me to trust to you. And then you pretended to care for me—do you think I would have tolerated your arm about me for one instant if I had not believed it was forever? Oh, if my father were here you would talk differently! Have you no honor? None? . . . Every one knew there was an—an affair of the heart growing between us, and then for us two to disappear—this night alone——"

Her voice kept breaking off. She could not control it or the tears that ran down her face in the darkness. She was a choking, crying wild thing.

Desperately she forced one last insistence, "Oh, you must, you must!"

"Must nothing," Byrd answered her savagely. "What kind of scheme is this, anyhow? I've had a few things tried before but this beats the Dutch. I don't know how much of this talk you mean but I'll tell you right now, young lady, nobody can tie me up for life with any such stuff. Father! Honor! Scandal! Believe me, little one, you've got the wrong number."

"You mean—you dare refuse?"

"You bet I dare refuse. There's no sense to all this. Nobody's going to think the worse of you because you got lost with me—and if you're trying to put anything over, you might as well stop now."

Maria Angelina stopped. It seemed to her that she should die of shame.

Dazedly she stood and looked at him through the darkness out of which a few drops of rain were again falling.

"You just forget it and get a bit of rest," Johnny Byrd advised brusquely. "Hurry in out of the wet. That thing's going to leak again," and he nodded jerkily up at the sky.

He tugged open the door, and stricken as a wounded creature crawling to shelter Maria Angelina bent her head and stumbled across the threshold.

"In you go," he said with a more cheerful air. "Wrap yourself up as warm as you can and I'll follow——"

She was within the doorway when these words came. She turned and saw that he was stooping to enter.

"I shall do quite well, Signor," she found her voice quickly to say. "You need not come in."

"Need not——?" He appeared caught with fresh amazement. "Judas, where do you think I'm going to stay? Out in the rain?"

"Certainly not in here, Signor."

Desperation lent Maria Angelina sudden fire. "You must be mad, Signor!" she told him fiercely.

"And you madder. You don't think I'm going to stay"—he jerked his head backward—"out in the wet?"

"But naturally. You are a man. It is your place."

"My place—you little Wop! A man! I'd be a dead one." The words of a humorous lecturer smote his memory and with harsh merriment he quoted, "'Good-night, Miss Middleton, said I, as I buttoned her carefully into her tent and went out to sleep upon a cactus.' . . . None of that stuff for mine," and without more ado Johnny Byrd lowered his head to pass under the doorway.

There was a gasp from the interior.

"Ri-Ri, listen to me!" he demanded upon the threshold. "You're raving—loco—nuts! There's no harm in my huddling under the same roof with you—it's a damn necessity. I'm not going to hold hands and I'm not going to kiss you. If you've got any drawn swords you can lay their blades between us. You turn your face to the wall and forget all about it and I'll do the same."

"Signor, stay without!"

"Got a dagger in your garter? . . . Ri-Ri, listen to me. You're absolutely wrong in the head. Be sensible. Have a heart. I'm going to get some rest."

"It does not matter what you say or what you intend. You do not need to reassure me that you will not kiss me, Signor. That will not happen again." Maria Angelina's voice was like ice. "But you are not coming within this place."

Tensely she confronted him. He loomed before her as a wolfish brute, seeking his comfort at this last cost of her pride. . . . But no man, she thought tragically, should ever say that he had spent the night within the same four walls.

She sprang forward, her hands outstretched, then shrank back.

She could not touch him. Not only the perception of the ludicrous folly of matching her strength against his withheld her, but some flaming fury against putting a hand upon a man who had so repudiated her.

Her brain grew alert. Suddenly very intent and collected she stepped aside and Johnny Byrd came in.

Close to the wall she pressed, edging nearer and nearer the door, and as he stumbled and fumbled with the blankets she gave a quick spring and flashed out.

Like mad she ran across the clearing, through a thicket, and out again and away.

On the instant he was after her; she heard his steps crashing behind her but she had the start of her swiftness and the speed of her desperation. Brambles meant nothing to her, nor the thickets nor branches. She flew on and on, lost in the darkness, his shouts growing fainter and fainter in her ears.

At last, in a shrub, she stopped to listen. She could hear nothing. Then came a call—very faint. It came from the wrong direction. She had turned and doubled like a hare and Johnny was pursuing, if he still pursued, a mistaken way.

She was safe . . . and she stood still for a few minutes to quiet her pounding heart and catch her gasping breath, and then she stole out, cautiously, anxiously hurrying, to make her own way down.

She had no idea of time or of distance. Vaguely she felt that it was the middle of the night but that if she were quick, very quick, she might reach the Lodge before it was too disastrously late. She might meet a searching party out for them—there would be searching parties if people were truly worried at their absence.

Of course if they thought it an elopement, they might not take that trouble. They might be merely waiting and conjecturing.

If only Cousin Jim had not returned to New York! He was so kind and concerned that he would be searching. There would be a chance of his understanding. But Cousin Jane—what would she believe?

Cousin Jane had seen Johnny draw her significantly back.

At her folly of the afternoon she looked back with horror. How bold she had been in that new American freedom! Mamma had warned her—dear Mamma so far away, so innocent of this terrible disgrace. . . .

Wildly she plunged on through the dark, hoping always for a path but finding nothing but rough wilderness. She knew no landmarks to guide her, but down she went determinedly, down, down continually.

An hour had passed. Perhaps two hours. The sky had grown blacker and blacker. There were occasional gusts of rain. The wind that had been threshing the tree tops blew with increasing fury.

Jagged tridents of lightning flashed before her eyes. Thunder followed almost instantly, great crashing peals that seemed to be rending the heavens.

Maria Angelina felt as if the splinters must fall upon her. It was like the voice of judgment.

On she went, down, down, through a darkness that was chaos lit by lightning. Rain came, in a torrent of water, heavy as lead, drenching her to the skin. Her hair had streamed loose and was plastered about her face, her throat, her arms. A strand like a wet rope wound about her wrist and delayed her. Often she slipped and fell.

Still down. But if she should find the Lodge, what then? What would they think of her, wet, torn, disheveled, an outcast of the night?

She sobbed aloud as she went. She, who had come to America so proudly, so confidently of glad fortune, who had thought the world a fairy tale and believed that she had found its prince—what place on earth would there be for her after this, disgraced and ashamed?

They would ship her back to Mamma at once. And the scandal would travel with her, whispered by tourists, blazoned by newspapers.

And her family had so counted upon her! They had looked for such great things!

Now she had utterly blackened their name, tarnished them all forever with her disrepute. Poor Julietta's hopes would be ruined. . . . No one would want a Santonini. . . . Lucia would be furious. The Tostis might even repudiate her—certainly they would inflict their condescension.

She could only disappear, hide in some nursing sisterhood.

So ran her wild thoughts as she scrambled down these endless mountain sides. All the black fears that she had fought off earlier in the evening by her belief in Johnny's devotion were upon her now like a pack of wolves. She wished that she could die at once and be out of it, yet when she heard the sudden wash of water, almost under her feet, she jumped aside and screamed.

A river! In the night it looked wider than that one they had followed that afternoon but it might only be another part of it.

Very wearily she made her way along the bank, so mortally tired that it seemed as if every step must be her last. There was no underbrush to struggle with now, for she had come to a grove of pines and their fallen needles made a carpet for her lagging feet.

The rain was nearly over, but she was too wet and too cold to take comfort in that.

More and more laggingly she went and at last, when a hidden root tripped her, she made no effort to rise, but lay prostrate, her cheek upon her outflung arm, and yielded to the dark, drowsy oblivion that stole numbingly over her.

She would be glad, she thought, never to wake.



CHAPTER IX

MRS. BLAIR REGRETS

It had taken a long time for concern to spread among the picnickers.

The sudden shower had sent them all scurrying for shelter, and when the climb was resumed, they crossed the river on those wide, flat stepping-stones that Johnny Byrd had missed, and re-formed in self-absorbed little twos and threes that failed to take note of the absence of the laggards.

When Ruth remembered to call back, "Where's Ri-Ri?" to her mother, Mrs. Blair only glanced over her shoulder and answered, "She's coming," with no thought of anxiety.

It did occur to her, however, somewhat later, that the girl was loitering a little too significantly with young Byrd, and she made a point of suggesting to Ruth, when she passed her in a short time, that she wait for her cousin who was probably finding the climb too strenuous.

"Who? Me?" said Ruth amazedly. "Gee, what do you want me to do—fan her? Let Johnny do it," and cheerfully she went on photographing a group upon a fallen log, and Mrs. Blair went on with the lawyer from Washington who was a rapid walker.

And Ruth, with the casual thought that neither Ri-Ri nor Johnny Byrd would relish such attendance, promptly let the thought of them dissolve from her memory.

She was immersed in her own particular world that afternoon.

Life was at a crisis for her. Robert Martin had been drifting faster and faster with the current of his admiration for her, and now seemed to have been brought up on very definite solid ground. He felt he knew where he was. And he wanted to know where Ruth was.

And Ruth found herself in that special quandary reserved for independent American girls who want to have their cake and eat it, too.

She wanted Bob Martin, and she wanted to be gratifyingly sure that Bob Martin wanted her—and then she wanted affairs to stand still at that pleasant pass, while she played about and invited adventure.

Life was so desirable as it was . . . especially with Bob Martin in the scene. But if he were unsatisfied he wouldn't remain there as part of the adjacent landscape.

Bob was no pursuing Lochinvar.

It was very delicate. She couldn't explain all her hesitation satisfactorily to herself, so she had made rather a poor job of it when she tried to explain to Bob.

Part of it was young unreadiness for the decisions and responsibilities of life, part of it was reprehensible aversion about shutting the door to other adventures, and part of it was her native energy, as yet unemployed, aware of a larger world and anxious to play some undivined part in its destinies.

She had always been furious that the war had come too soon for her. She would have loved to have gone over there, and known the mud and doughnuts and doughboys . . . and the excitement and the officers. . . .

But Bob wasn't going to dangle much longer. He hadn't a doubt but that everything was all right and he was in haste to taste the assurance.

And Ruth wasn't going to lose him.

These hesitations of hers would convey nothing to his youthful masculinity but that she didn't care enough. And his was not the age that appreciates the temporizing half loaf.

So that trip up the mountain meant for them much youthful discussion, much searching of wills and hearts and motives, a threatening gloom upon his part, and a struggling defensiveness upon hers.

Small wonder that Maria Angelina and her companion were not remembered!

It was not until she was at the very top of old Baldy, and again a part of the general group that Ruth had the thought to look about her and recognize her cousin's absence.

"They are taking their time," she remarked to Bob.

"Glad they're enjoying it," he gave back with a disgruntled air that Ruth determinedly ignored.

"I guess Ri-Ri's no good at a climb," she said. "This little old mountain must have got her."

"Oh, Johnny's strong right arm will do the work," he returned indifferently.

"But they ought to be here now. You don't suppose they missed the way?" Mrs. Blair, overhearing, suggested, and turned to look down the steep path that they had come.

Bob scouted the idea of such a mishap.

"Johnny knows his way about. They'll be along when they feel like it," he predicted easily, and Mrs. Blair turned to the arrangement of supper with a slight anxiety which she dissembled beneath casual cheerfulness.

In her heart she was vexed. Dreadfully noticeable, she thought, that persistent lagging of theirs. She might have expected it of Johnny Byrd—he had a way of making new girls conspicuous—but she had looked for better things from Maria Angelina.

It was too bad. It showed that as soon as you gave those cloistered girls an inch they took an ell.

Outwardly she spoke with praise of her charge. Julia Martin, a youthful aunt of Bob's, was curious about the girl.

"She's the loveliest creature," she declared with facile enthusiasm, as she and Mrs. Blair delved into a hamper that the Martins' chauffeur and butler had shouldered up before the picnickers.

"And so naively young—I don't see how her mother dared let her come so far away."

"Oh—her mother wanted her to see America," Mrs. Blair gave back.

"She must be having a wonderful time," pursued the young lady. "She was simply a picture at the dance. . . . Think of giving a mountain climb the night after the dance," she added in a lower voice. "Bob and his mother are perfectly mad. I think they want to kill their guests off—perhaps there's method in their madness. . . . I never saw anything quite like her," she resumed upon Maria Angelina. "I fancy Johnny Byrd hasn't either!"

"Wasn't she pretty?" agreed Mrs. Blair with pleasantness, laying out the spoons. "Yes, it's very interesting for her to have this," she went on, "before she really knows Roman society. . . . She will come out as soon as she returns from America, I suppose. The eldest sister is being married this fall, and the next sister and Maria Angelina are about of an age."

"Little hard on the sister unless she is a raving, tearing beauty," said the intuitive Miss Martin with a laugh. "Perhaps they are sending Maria Angelina away to keep her in abeyance!"

"Perhaps," Mrs. Blair assented. "At any rate, with this preliminary experience, I fancy that little Ri-Ri will make quite a sensation over there."

It was as if she said plainly to the curious young aunt that this pilgrimage was only a prelude in Maria Angelina's career, and she certainly did not take its possibilities for any serious finalities.

But the youthful aunt was not intimidated.

"She'll make a sensation over here if she carries off the Byrd millions," she threw out smartly.

Mrs. Blair smiled with an effect of remote amusement. Inwardly she knew sharp annoyance. She wished she could smack that loitering child. . . . Very certainly she would betray no degrading interest in her fortunes. The Martins were not to think that she was intent on placing any one!

"Johnny Byrd's a child," said she indifferently.

"He's been of age two years," said the youthful aunt, "and he's out of college now and very much a catch—all his vacations used to be hairbreadth escapes. Of course he courts danger," she threw in with a little laugh and a sidelong look.

But Mrs. Blair was not laughing. She was blaming herself for the negligence which had made this situation possible, although—extenuation made haste to add within her—no one could humanly be expected to be going up and down a trail all afternoon to gather in the stragglers. And she had told Ruth to wait.

"She's probably just tired out," said the stout widower with strong accents of sympathy. "Climb too much for her, and very sensibly they've turned back."

"If I could only be sure. If I could only be sure she wasn't hurt—or lost," said Mrs. Blair doubtfully.

"Lost!" Bob Martin derided. "Lost—on a straight trail. Not unless they jolly wanted to!"

"Don't spoil the party, mother," was Ruth's edged advice. "Ri-Ri hasn't broken any legs or necks. And she wasn't alone to get lost. She just gave up and Johnny Byrd took her home. I know her foot was blistered at the dance last night and that's probably the matter."

It was the explanation they decided to adopt.

Mrs. Blair, recalling that this was not her expedition, made a double duty of appearing sensibly at ease, although the nervous haste with which a sudden noise would bring her to alertness, facing the path, revealed some inner tension.

The young people were inclined to be hilarious over the affair, inventing fresh reasons for the absent ones, reasons that ranged from elopement to wood pussies.

"There was one around last night," the tennis champion insisted.

But the hilarity was only a flash in the pan. After its flare the party dragged. Curiosity preoccupied some; uneasiness communicated itself to others. And the frank abstraction of Ruth and Bob had a depressing effect upon the atmosphere.

And the runaways were missed. Johnny Byrd had an infectious way of making a party go and Maria Angelina's sweet soprano had become so much a part of every gathering that its absence now made song a dejection.

Other things of Maria Angelina than her soprano were missed, also.

Julia Martin found the popular bachelor decidedly absent-minded. The crack young polo player thought the scenery disappointing. Decidedly, it was a dull party.

And the weather was threatening.

So after supper had been disposed of and there had been a bonfire and an effort at singing about it, a dispirited silence spread until a decent interval was felt to have elapsed and allowed the suggestion of return.

Once it was suggested everybody seemed ready for the start, even without the moon, for the path was fairly clear and the men had pocket flashlights, so down in the dark they started, proceeding cautiously and gingerly, and accumulating mental reservations about mountains and mountain climbing until the moon suddenly overtook them and sent a silvering wash of light into the valley at their feet.

They had gained the main path before the moon deserted them, and the first of the gusty showers sent them hurrying along in shivering impatience for the open fires of homes.

"We'll find that pair of short sports toasting their toes and giving us the laugh," predicted Bob, tramping along, a hand on Ruth's arm now.

Ruth was wearing his huge college sweater over her silk one and felt indefinably less adventurous and independent than on her upward trip. Bob seemed very stable, very desirable, as she stumbled wearily on. She wasn't quite sure what she had wanted to gain time for, that afternoon. Already the barriers of custom and common-sense were raising their solid heads.

And Bob was romance, too. It was silly to be unready for surrender. She realized that if she lost him. . . .

At the Lodge she gave him back a quick look that set him astir.

"Hold on," he called as she broke from him to follow her mother.

The cars from the Martin house party had been left at the Lodge in readiness and with perfunctory warmth of farewells the tired mountaineers were hastening either to the Lodge or the motors.

"Here's Johnny's car," he sung out. "He's probably inside——" and Bob swung hastily after Ruth and her mother.

He was up the steps beside them and opened the door into the wide hall where a group was lingering about the open fire.

A glance told them Johnny Byrd was not of the company. Bob and Ruth went to the door of the music room. It was deserted. Mrs. Blair went swiftly to the clerk's desk at the side entrance.

She came back, looking upset. Maria Angelina had not returned, to the clerk's knowledge. No one had telephoned any news.

"I'll go up and make sure," offered Ruth, and sped up the stairs only to return in a few minutes with a face of dawning excitement.

"They must be lost!" she announced in a voice that drew instant attention.

"Did you look to see if her things were there?" said her mother in an agitated undertone.

Bob Martin met her glance with swift intelligence.

"Johnny's car is out there," he told them. "It isn't that—they are simply lost, as Ruth says. Wait—I must tell them before they get away," and he hurried out into the increasing downpour.

Mrs. Blair turned on her daughter a face of pale misgiving.

"I knew it," she said direfully. "I felt it all along. . . . She's lost."

"Well, she'll be found," said Ruth lightly, with an indisputable lift of excitement. "The bears won't eat them."

Mrs. Blair's eyes shifted uneasily to meet the advancing circle from the fire.

"There are worse bites than bears'," she found time to throw out, before she had to voice the best possible version of Maria Angelina's disappearance.

Instantly a babble of facile comfort rose.

They would be here any moment now.

Some one had picked them up—they were safe and sound, this instant.

There wasn't a thing that could happen—it wasn't as though these were wilds.

Just telephone about—she mustn't worry. As soon as it was light some one would go out and track them.

Why, Judge Carney's boys had been lost all night and breakfasted on blueberries. It wasn't uncommon.

And nothing could happen to her—with Johnny Byrd along.

Oh, Johnny would take care of her—by morning everything would be all right.

But how in the world had it happened? That was such an easy trail!

And that was the question that stared, Argus-eyed, at Jane Blair. It was the question, she knew, that they were all asking themselves—and the others—in covert curiosity.

What had happened? And how had it happened?



CHAPTER X

FANTASY

She awoke to fright—some great hairy beast of the forest was nosing her.

Then a light flashed in her eyes, and as she closed them, drifting off to exhaustion again, she half saw a figure stooping towards her. Then she felt herself being carried, while a barking seemed to be all about her.

The next thing she knew was light forcing its brightness through her closed lids and a great warmth beating upon her.

She dragged her eyes open again. She was lying on a black bear skin rug before a roaring fire, and some one was kneeling beside her, tucking cushions beneath her head. She had a glimpse of a khaki sleeve and a lean brown wrist.

The warmth was delicious. She wanted to put her head back against those pillows and sleep forever but memory was rousing, too.

Sleepily, she mumbled, "What time is it?"

The khaki shirt sleeve had withdrawn from view and the answering voice came from a corner of the room.

"It's about two."

Two o'clock! The night gone—gone past redemption.

"Oh, Madre mia!" whispered Maria Angelina.

She struggled up on one elbow, her little face, scratched and stained, staring wildly out from the dark thicket of hair. "But where am I? Where is this place? Is it near the Lodge—near Wilderness Lodge?"

"We're miles from Wilderness," said the voice out of the shadows. "This is Old Chief Mountain—on the Little Pine River."

Old Chief Mountain! Vaguely Maria Angelina recalled that stony peak, far behind Old Baldy. . . . They had climbed the wrong mountain, indeed. . . . And she had plunged farther away, in her headlong flight.

She stared about her. She saw a huge fireplace where the flames were dancing. Above it, on a wide mantel, was a disarray of books, cigar-boxes, pipes and papers, the papers weighted oddly with a jar of obviously pickled frogs.

Upon the log walls several fishing rods were stretched on nails and a gun, a corn-popper, a rough coat and cap and a fishing net were all hung on neighboring hooks.

It was the cabin of some woodsman, and she seemed alone in it with the woodsman and his dog, a tawny collie—the wild animal of her awakening. Quietly alert, he lay now beside her, his grave, bright eyes upon her face.

The woodsman she could not see.

"Now see if you can drink all of this." The khaki sleeve had appeared from the shadows and was holding a steaming cup to her lips.

It was a huge cup made of granite ware. Obediently Maria Angelina drank. The contents were scalding hot and while her throat seemed blistered the warmth penetrated her veins in quick reaction.

"Lucky I didn't empty my coffeepot," said the voice cheerfully. "There it was—waiting to be heated. Memorandum—never wash a coffeepot."

The voice seemed coming to her out of a dream. Thrusting back the tangled hair from her eyes Maria Angelina lifted them incredulously to the woodsman's face.

Was it true? . . . Those clear, sharp-cut features, those bright, keen eyes with the gay smile! . . . Was it true—-or was she dreaming?

Instinctively she dropped her hand and let her hair like a black curtain shield her face. The blood seemed to stand still in her veins waiting that dreadful instant of recognition.

Confusedly, with some frantic thought of flight, "I must go—Oh, I must go——"

She sat up, still hiding, like Godiva, in her hair.

"You lie down and rest," said the authoritative voice. "If there's any going to be done I'll do it. Is there some other Babe in the Woods to be found?"

"Oh, no—no, but I must go——"

"You get a good rest. You can tell me all about it and who you are when you're dry and warm."

She yielded to the compulsion in his voice and to her own weakness, and lay very still and inert, her cheek upon her outflung arm, her eyes watching the red dance of flames through the black strands of her hair. It was the final irony, she felt, of that dreadful night. To meet Barry Elder again—like this—after all her dreams——

It was too terrible to be true.

And he did not know her. He had come to that place of his, in the Adirondacks, of which he had spoken, and had never given her a thought. He had never come to see her. . . .

A great wave of mortification surged over Maria Angelina, bearing a medley of images, of thoughts, of old hopes—like the wash from some sinking ship. What a fool of hope she had been! How vain and silly and credulous! . . . She had dreamed of this man, sung to the thought of him—quickened to absurd expectancy at every stir of the wheels. . . . And then she had pictured him at the seashore, beneath the spell of that gold-haired siren—and here he was, quite near and free—utterly unremembering!

She had suffered many pangs of mortification this night but now her poor, shamed spirit bled afresh.

But perhaps he had just come. And certainly he would remember to come and see his friends, the Blairs, and possibly he would remember that foreign cousin of theirs that he had danced with—just remember her with pleasant friendliness. She would give herself so much of balm.

And who indeed was she for Barry Elder to remember? Just a very young, very silly goose of a girl, a little foreigner . . . some one to nickname and pet carelessly . . . a girl who had been good enough for Johnny Byrd to make love to but not good enough for him to marry. . . .

A girl who had thrown her name recklessly to the winds and who, to-morrow, would be a byword. . . .

These thoughts ached in her with her bruised flesh.

Meanwhile Barry Elder had been making quick trips about the room and now he threw down an armful of garments beside her and knelt at her feet, tugging at her sopping shoes.

"Let me get these off—there, that's better. Now the other one. . . . Lordy, child, those footies. . . . Now you'd better get into these dry things as quick as you can. Not a perfect fit, but the best I can do. I'll take a turn in the woods and be back in ten minutes. So you hurry up."

He closed the door upon the words that Maria Angelina was beginning to frame and left her looking helplessly at a pair of corduroy knickerbockers, a blue flannel shirt, a strange undergarment, plaid golf stockings and a pair of fringed moccasins.

They were in an untouched heap when her host returned, letting in a cold rush of the night with him.

"What's this?" he flung out in mock severity. "See here, young lady, you must get into those clothes whether they happen to be the style or not! Little girls who get wet can't go to sleep in their clothes. Now I'll give you just ten minutes more and then if you are not a good girl——"

To her own dismay and to his Maria Angelina burst into tears.

"Oh, come now," said Barry helplessly. "You poor little dud——"

The sudden gentleness of his voice undid the last of the girl's control. She sobbed harder and harder as he sat down beside her and began to pat her shaking shoulders.

"You shan't do anything you don't want to," he comforted. "You're tired out, I know. But you'd be so much more comfy in these dry togs——"

"Oh, please, Signor, not those things. Do not make me. I will get dry——"

"You don't have to if you don't want to," he told her gently, looking down in a puzzled way at her distress. Her face was buried in a crook of her arm; her black hair streamed tempestuously over her heaving shoulders. "Come closer to the fire, then, and dry out."

He threw more wood upon the flames and piled on brush that shed a swift, crackling heat.

"Give that a chance at those wet clothes of yours," he advised. "Meanwhile we'd better wring this out," and with businesslike despatch he began gathering that dripping black hair into the folds of a Turkish towel. Very strenuously he wrung it.

"That's what I do for my kid sister when she's been in swimming," he mentioned. "She's at the seashore now—no getting her away from the water. She's a bigger girl than you are. . . . Now when you feel better suppose you tell me all about it. Did you say you came from Wilderness Lodge?"

"Yes," said Maria Angelina half whisperingly.

Had he no memory of her at all? Or was she so different in that wet, muddied blouse, hair streaming, and face scratched—she looked down at her grimy little hands and wondered dumbly what her face might look like.

And then she saw that Barry Elder, having finished with her hair, was preparing to wash her face, for he brought a granite basin of hot water and began wetting and soaping the end of a voluminous towel with which he advanced upon her.

"I can well wash myself," she cried with promptness, and most thoroughly she washed and scrubbed, and then hung her head as he took away the things.

She felt as if a screening mask had fallen and her only thought now was to make an escape before discovery should add one more humiliation to this night of shames.

"You are very good," she said shyly. "I cannot tell you how I thank you. And I feel so much better that if you will please let me go——"

"Go? To Wilderness Lodge? It's miles and miles, child—and it's pouring cats and dogs again. Don't you hear the drumsticks on the roof?"

She hesitated. "Then—have you a telephone?"

"No, thank the Lord!" The remembered laughter flashed in Barry Elder's tones. "I came here to get away from the devil of invention and all his works. There isn't a telephone nearer than Peter's place—four miles away. I'll go over for you as soon as it's light, for I expect your mother's worrying her head off about you. How did you ever happen to get lost over here?"

Helplessly Maria Angelina sought for words. Silence was ungrateful but there seemed nothing she could say.

"It was on a picnic—please do not ask me," she whispered foolishly.

In humorous perplexity the young man stood looking down upon the small figure that chance had deposited so unexpectedly upon his hearth, a most forlorn and drooping small figure, with downcast and averted head, then with that sudden smile that made his young face so brightly persuasive he dropped beside her and reached towards her.

"Here, little kiddie, you come and sit with me while I warm those feet of yours——"

Swiftly she withdrew from his kindly reaching hands.

"Signor, it is not fitting that you should hold me, that you should warm my feet," she gasped. "I am not a child, Signor!"

Signor . . . The word waked some echo in his mind. . . . The child had used it before—but what connection was groping——?

He repeated the word aloud.

"You do not recall?" said Maria Angelina chokingly. "Though indeed, there is no reason why you should. It was but for a moment——"

She glanced up to see recognition leap amazedly into his face.

"The little Signorina! The Blairs' little Signorina!"

"Maria Angelina Santonini," she told him soberly. "Yes, that is I."

"Why of course I remember," he insisted. "A little girl in a white dress. A big hat which you took off. Your first night in America. We had a wonderful dance together——"

"And you said you would come to the mountains," she told him childishly.

He stared a moment. "Why, so I did. . . . And here I am. And here you are. To think I did not know you—I've been wondering whom you made me want to think of! But I took you for a youngster, you know, a regular ten-year-old runaway. Why, with your hair down like that—— Of course, it was absurd of me."

He paused with a smile for the absurdity of it.

Gallantly she tried to give him back that smile but there was something so wan and piteous in the curve of her soft lips, something so hurt and sick in the shadows of her dark eyes, that Barry Elder felt oddly silenced.

And then he tried to cover that silence with kind chatter as he moved about his room once more in hospitable preparation.

"It was Sandy, here, who really found you," he told her. "He whined at the door till I let him out and then he came back, barking, for me, so I had to go. I was really looking for a mink. Sandy's always excited about minks."

Maria Angelina put a hand to the dog's head and stroked it.

"I was so tired," she said. "I think I was asleep."

"I rather think you were," said Barry in an odd tone. He glanced at her white cheek with its scarlet scratch of a branch. "And I rather think you ought to be asleep now but first you must eat this and drink some more coffee."

Maria Angelina needed no urging. Like a starveling she fell upon that plate of crisp bacon and delicately fried eggs and cleaned it to the last morsel.

"I had but two bites of sweet chocolate for my dinner," she apologized.

"So you were lost before dinner—no wonder you were done in."

Barry filled a very worn-looking little brown pipe with care. "Where were you going, anyway, for your picnic?"

"It was to Old Baldy."

"Old Baldy, eh? Let me see—what trail did you take?"

"On the river path. Then—then we got separated——"

"I see. But it's a fairly clear trail. Did you try another?"

"We—we crossed the river the wrong time, I think, and so got on the wrong mountain. We——"

Maria Angelina's voice died away in sudden sick perception of that betraying pronoun.

Quite slowly, without looking at her, Barry completed the lighting of that pipe to his satisfaction and drew a few appreciative puffs. Then he turned to inquire casually, "And who is 'we'?"

He saw only the top of the girl's tousled head and the tense grip of her clasped hands in her lap.

"If you would not ask, Signor!" she said whisperingly.

"A dark secret!" He tried to laugh over that but his keen eyes rested on her with a troubled wonder.

"And then you got lost—even from your companion?" he prompted quietly.

"Yes, I—I came away alone for he—he refused to go on," faltered Maria Angelina painfully, "and then I seemed to go on forever—and I could do no more. But now I am quite well again," she insisted with a ghost of a brave smile. "If only—if only my Cousin Jane could know that I'm trying to get back," she finished in a tone that shook in spite of her.

"You weren't trying to get lost, were you?" questioned Barry lightly, groping for a cue. There was no mistaking the flash of Maria Angelina's repudiation and the candor of her suddenly upraised young face.

"Oh, no, Signor, no, no! It was only that I was so careless—that I believed he knew the way."

"And was he trying to get lost?"

"Oh, no, Signor, no, it was all a mistake."

"This is a very easy neck of the woods to get lost in," Barry told her reassuringly. "Old residents here often miss their way—especially in a storm. Mrs. Blair will worry, of course, but she is very sensible and she knows you will come to light with the daylight. Just as soon as it is clear enough for me to find my way I'll strike over to Peter's place and phone her that you are safe and sound, and I'll get a horse for you to ride out on—you won't care for any more walking and the motor can only come as far as the road."

"But you must not tell them you have found me," said Maria Angelina, overwhelmed with tragedy again. She seemed fated, she thought in dreadful humor, to spend the night with young men! And to have been lost by one and found by another!

"It will be so much worse," she said pleadingly. "Could you not just show me the way and let me go——?"

"So much worse?" His face was very grave and gentle. "So much worse? I don't think I understand."

"So very much worse. To have been found like this—Oh, promise me to say nothing about it. I know that I can trust you."

"I think you had better tell me all about it, Signorina."

He saw that dark misery, like a film, swim blindingly over her wide eyes.

"I cannot."

He considered a moment before he spoke again.

"If you really do not want any one to know that I found you I am willing to hold my tongue. But don't you see what a lot of ridiculous deception that would involve? You would have to make up all sorts of little things. And then, after all, you'd be sure to say something—one always does—and let it all out——"

Maria Angelina looked at him pathetically and a sudden impulse stabbed him to say hastily, "I'll fall in with any plan you want to make. Only wait to decide until you feel rested. Then perhaps we can decide together. . . . And now, if you are really getting dry——"

"Truly, I am, Signor Elder. I am indeed dry and hot."

"Then you'd better make up your mind to curl up on that cot over there and sleep."

"I couldn't sleep."

There was truth beneath Maria Angelina's quick disclaimer. Exhausted as she was, her mind was vividly awake, now, excited with the strangeness of her presence there.

Her mortification at his finding her was gone. He was so rarely kind, so pleasantly matter of fact. He was as gayly undisturbed as if the heavens rained starving young girls upon him every night! And somehow she had known he was like this . . . but he was like no one else that she had known. . . .

Her mind groped for a comparison. For an instant she vainly tried to picture Paolo Tosti doing the honors to such a guest—but that picture was unpaintable.

This Barry Elder was chivalry itself; he was kindness and comfort—and he was a strange, stirring excitement that flung a glamour over the disaster of the hour.

It was like a little hush before the final storm, a dim dream before the nightmare enfolded her again.

Her eyes followed him as he turned out the kerosene lamp, which was sputtering, and flung fresh logs upon the hearty fire. Overhead the rain droned, like monotonous fingers upon a keyboard, and beside her Sandy slept noisily, with sudden whimpers.

Barry's eyes, meeting the wistful dark ones, smiled responsively, and Maria Angelina felt a queer tightening within her, as if some one had tied a band about her heart.

"You don't have such fires in Italy," he observed, dropping down upon the rug across from her, and refilling that battered pipe of his. "I well remember when I ordered a fire and the cameraria came in with a bunch of twigs."

Madly Maria Angelina fell upon the revelation.

"You have been in Italy!"

"Oh, more than once! But all before the war."

"And you have been in Rome? Oh, to think of that! But where did you stay? Whom did you know there, Signor?"

Barry grinned. "Head waiters!"

"You knew no Romans, then? Oh, but that was a pity."

"I can well believe it, Signorina!"

"Oh, Rome can be very gay—though I am not out in society myself, and know so little. . . . What did you do, then? I suppose you went to the Forum and the Vatican and the Via Appia like all the tourists and drove out to the Coliseum by moonlight?"

Delightedly she laughed as Barry Elder confirmed her account of his activities.

"Me, I have never seen the Coliseum by moonlight," she reported plaintively, adding with eager wistfulness, "And did you buy violets on the Spanish Stairs? And throw a penny into the Trevi fountain to ensure your return? And do you remember the street that turns off left, the Via Poli? From there you come quick to my house, the Palazzo Santonini——"

"And do you really live in a palace?" It was Barry's turn to question. "A really truly palace? And is your father a really truly prince?"

"Nothing so great! He is a count—but of a very old family, the Santonini," Maria Angelina explained with becoming pride.

"And is your mother of a very old——"

"My mother is American—the cousin of Mrs. Blair. But Mamma has never been back in America—she is too devoted to us, is Mamma, and she has so much to look after for Papa. Papa is charming but he does not manage."

"That makes complications," said Barry gravely.

"And Francisco, my brother, is just like him. He is always running bills, now that he is in the army. And he was so brave in the war that Mamma cannot bear to be cross. He will have to marry an heiress, that boy," she sighed and Barry Elder's eyes lighted in amusement.

"How many of you are there?" he wanted interestedly to know, and vivaciously Maria Angelina informed him of her sisters, her life, her lessons, the rare excursions, the pension at the seashore, the engagement of her sister Lucia and Paolo Tosti.

And absorbedly Barry Elder listened, his eyes on her changing face. When she paused he flung in some question or some anecdote of his own times in Italy and Sandy was often roused by unseasonable laughter, and thudded his tail in sleepy friendliness before dozing off to his dreams again.

Then like a flash, as swiftly as it had come, the excited glow of recollection was an extinguished flame, leaving her shivering before a nearer memory.

For Barry Elder asked one question too many. He brought the present down upon them.

"And how do you like America?" he asked. "Has it been good fun for you up here?"

Only the blind could have missed the change that came over the girl's face, blotting out its laughter and etching in queer, startled fear.

"It has been—very gay," she stammered.

Despairingly she asked herself why she still tried to hide her story from him since in the morning it must all come out. He would know all about her then. And what must he be thinking already of her stammered evasions?

Oh, if only on that yesterday, which seemed a thousand yesterdays away, she had stayed closely by her Cousin Jane! If she had not let her folly wreck all her life!

Bitterly ironic to know that all the time Barry Elder was here, at hand. If only she had known! Had he just come?

She wondered and asked the question.

And at that Barry's face changed as if he had remembered something he would have been as glad to forget.

"Oh—I've been here a few days," he gave back vaguely.

She glanced about the shadowy room. "So alone?"

A wry smile touched his mouth. "I came for alone-ness. I had a play to write—I wanted to work some things out for myself," and indefinably but certainly Maria Angelina caught the impression that all the things he wanted to work out for himself in this solitude were not connected with his play.

His linked hands had slipped over his knees and he looked ahead of him very steadily into the fire, and Maria Angelina had a feeling that he looked that way into the fire many evenings, so oddly, grimly intent, with oblivious eyes and faintly ironic lips.

He was quiet so long, without moving, that she felt as if he had forgotten her. He did not look happy. . . . Something dark had touched him. . . .

"Is it something you want that you cannot get, Signor?" she asked him in a grave little voice.

He turned his eyes to her, and she saw there was smoldering fire beneath their surface brightness.

"No, Signorina, it is something that I want and that I can get."

"There is no difficulty there," she murmured.

"No?" His tone held mockery. "The difficulty is in me. . . . I don't want to want it."

His eyes continued to rest on her in ironic smiling.

"Signorina, what would you do if you wanted a cake, oh, such a beautiful cake, all white icing and lovely sugar outside . . . and within—well, something that was very, very bad for the digestion? Only the first bite would be good, you see. But such a first bite! And you wanted it—because the icing was so marvelous and the sugar so sweet. . . . And if you had wanted that cake a long time, oh, before you knew what a cheating thing it was within, and if you had been denied it and suddenly found it was within your reach——?"

He broke off with a laugh.

Slowly she asked, "And would you have to eat the cake if you took the first bite?"

His voice was harsh. "To the last crumb."

"Then I would not bite."

"But the frosting, Signorina, the pretty pink and white frosting!"

So bitter was his laugh that the girl grew older in understanding. She thought of the girl she had seen by his side in the restaurant, the girl whose eyes had been as blue as the sea and her hair yellow as amber . . . the girl who had angled for Bob Martin's money.

She remembered that Barry Elder had of late inherited some money.

Impulsively she leaned towards him, her eyes dark and pitiful in her white face.

"Do not touch it," she whispered. "Do not. I do not want you to be unhappy——"

Utterly she understood. His absurd metaphor was no protection against her. She remembered all Cousin Jane's implications, all the bald revelations of Johnny Byrd.

Somehow he had come to know that the heart of Leila Grey was a cheating thing, yet for the sake of the beauty which had so teased him, for the glamorous loveliness of those blue eyes and rosy tints, he was almost ready to let himself be borne on by his inclinations. . . .

Barry Elder looked startled at that earnest little whisper and his eyes met hers unguarded a full minute, then a whimsical smile touched his lips to softness.

"I'm afraid you have a tender heart, Maria Angelina Santonini," he said. "You want all the world to have nice wholesome cake, beautifully frosted—don't you?"

Her gravity refused his banter. "Not all the world. Only those for whom realities matter. Only those—those like you, Signor—who could feel pain and disillusionment."