She turned, quickly tossing the willow branches aside and laughing gayly.  “There now, that will set you off thinking of your knights again!  But you must not.  Truly, you must not.  For it is quite true, dear; you are a dreamer, a poet.  You do indeed belong to the Arcadian Hills.  You should be there now, playing a gentle shepherd’s pipe and herding his peaceful flocks.  And instead—­alas!”—­she looked at him in perplexity which was partly real and partly assumed—­“instead you are here in this awful wilderness, carrying a rifle longer and heavier than yourself, and trying to pretend that you like to kill wild beasts, or can endure to hurt any living thing.”

David said nothing; there seemed to be no response for him to make.  When a well-grown youth of eighteen or thereabouts is spoken to by a girl near his own age as he had just been spoken to by Ruth, he rarely finds anything to say.  No words could do justice to what he feels.  And there is nothing for him to do either, unless it be to take refuge in a dignified silence which disdains the slightest notice of the offence.  This was what David resorted to, and, bending down, he calmly and quietly raised his forgotten rifle from the ground to his shoulder.  He did it very slowly and impressively, however, in the hope that Ruth might realize the fact that he had killed the buck whose huge horns made the rifle’s rest on his cabin walls.  But she saw and realized only that he was wounded, and instantly darted toward him like a swallow.  She caught his rigid rifle arm and clung to it, looking up in his set face.  Her blue eyes were already filling with tears while the smile was still on her lips.  That was Ruth’s way; her smiles and tears were even closer together than most women’s are; she was nearly always quiveringly poised between gayety and sadness; like a living sunbeam continually glancing across life’s shadows.

“What is it, David, dear?” she pleaded, with her sweet lips close to his ear.  “What foolish thing have I said?  You must know—­whatever it was—­that it was all in fun.  Why, I wouldn’t have you different, dear, if I could!  I couldn’t love you so much if you were not just what you are.  And yet,” sighing, “it might be better for you.”

She laid her head against his shoulder and drew closer to him in that soft little nestling way of hers.  David looked straight over the lovely head, keeping his grim gaze as high as he could.  He knew how it would be if his stern gray eyes were to meet Ruth’s wet blue ones.  He was still a boy, but trying to be a man—­and beginning to understand.  No man with his heart in the right place could hold out against her pretty coaxing.  It was sweet enough to wile the very birds out of the trees.  It made no difference that he had been used to her wiles from babyhood up.  To be used to Ruth’s ways only made them harder to resist.  No stranger could possibly have foreseen his defeat as clearly as David foresaw his at the moment that she started