With head down she came, slowly, yielding yet resisting, with little shudders of terror that was yet a strange delight, with eyes that dared give him but one quick little look, half pleading and half fear.  But then after a few tense seconds her struggles were all housed far within his arms; there was no longer play for the faintest of them; and she was strained until she felt her heart rush out to him as she had once felt it go to her dream of a single love,—­with the utter abandon of the falling water beside them.

On the opposite side of the park across the half-acre of waving bunch-grass, a many-pronged old buck in his thin red summer coat lay at the edge of the quaking aspens, sunning the velvet of his tender new horns to harden them against approaching combats.  He had shrewdly noted that the first comer did not see him; but this second was a creature of action in whose presence it were ill-advised to linger.  Noiselessly his hindquarters raised from the ground, and then with a snort of indignation and a mighty, crashing rush he was off through the trees and up the hill.  Doubtless the beast cherished a delusion of clever escape from a dangerous foe; but neither of the pair standing so near saw or heard him or would have been conscious of him even had he led past them in wild flight the biggest herd it had ever been his lot to domineer.  For these two were lost to all but the wonder of the moment, pushing fearfully on into the glory and sweetness of it.

His voice came to her in a dull murmur, and the sound of the running water came, again like the muffled tinkling of little silver bells in the distance.  Both his arms were strong about her, and now her own hands rose in rebellion to meet where the kerchief was knotted at the back of his neck, quite as the hands of the other woman had rebelliously flung down the scarf from the balcony.  Then the brim of his hat came down over her hair, and her lips felt his kiss.

They stood so a long time, it seemed to them, in the high grass, amid the white-barked quaking aspens, while a little wind from the dark pines at their side, lowered now to a yearning softness, played over them.  They were aroused at last by a squirrel that ran half-way down the trunk of a near-by spruce to bark indignantly at them, believing they menaced his winter’s store of spruce cones piled at the foot of the tree.  With rattle after rattle his alarm came, until he had the satisfaction of noting an effect.

The young man put the girl away from him to look upon her in the new light that enveloped them both, still holding her hands.

“There’s one good thing about your marriages,—­they marry you for eternity, don’t they?  That’s for ever—­only it isn’t long enough, even so—­not for me.”

“I thought you were never coming.”

“But you said”—­he saw the futility of it, however, and kissed her instead.

“I was afraid of you all this summer,” he said.