Only the warm blood of perfect health could have endured the temperature of that shaded mountain pool so long, and soon even she felt its chill gripping her young muscles, and, as unconscious of her wholly revealed loveliness as any nymph of old mythology, scrambled from the water to the bank and stood there where a shaft of comfortable sunshine found its welcome way through rifted foliage above.  To this she turned first one bare shoulder, then the other, with as evident a sensuous delight as she had shown when the cool water first closed over her.  Then, throwing back her head, she stood full in the brilliance, and, inhaling deeply, let the sunlight fall upon the loveliness of her young chest.  The delight of this was far too great for voiceless pleasure, and her deep, rich laughter rippled out as liquid and as musical as the tones of the tiny waterfall above the pool.  She raised a knee and then the other to let the vitalizing sunlight fall upon them; then, with head drooped forward on her breast, stood with her sturdy but delicious shoulders in its shining path.  Her happiness was perfect and she smiled continually, even when she was not giving vent to audible expressions of enjoyment.

Suddenly, however, this idyllic scene was interrupted.  In the woods she heard the crashing of an awkward footstep and a muttered word or two in a strange voice, as might come from a lowlander whose face has suffered from the sting of a back-snapping branch.

For an instant she poised, frightened, on the bank.  The intruder’s crashing progress was bringing him, as her ears plainly told her, steadily in her direction.  Panic-stricken, for a moment, she crouched, hugging her bare limbs in an ecstasy of fear.  To get her clothes and put them on before he reached the pool would be impossible, a hasty glance about her showed no cover thick enough to flee to.

One concealment only offered perfect hiding—­the very pool from which she had so recently emerged.  She poised to slip again into the water noiselessly and then caught sight of her disordered clothing on the bank.  To leave it there would as certainly reveal her presence as to remain on the bank herself!  Hastily she gathered it and the new spelling book into her arms, and, with not ten seconds of spare time to find the cover which she so desperately needed, endeavored to slip quietly into the pool again.

Her certainty of movement failed her, this time, though, and one foot slipped.  Into the pool she went, half-falling, and with a splash which, she was certain, would be audible a hundred yards away.  Terrified anew by this, she dived quickly to the bottom of the pool and with all a trout’s agility and fearlessness, her clothing and beloved book clasped tight against her bosom by her crooked left arm, her right arm sending her with rapid strokes, when she was quite submerged, the full length of the pool to its far end.  There a fallen tree, relic of some woodland tempest of years