“Did she ever marry, Doctor?” she asked eagerly.  “Oh, I hope she did not.  I might forgive her if she did not; but if she married I would never forgive her!”

The Doctor’s eyes, as they rested on her eager face, had a kindly expression in them, and a look of amusement lurked there also.

“No; she never married,” he said.  “Nor did he.”

“Oh, I am glad of that,” she exclaimed; and then more softly added, “I know he did not.”

Dr. Balsam gazed at her calmly.  He did not pursue the subject further.  He thought he had told his story in such a way as to convey the moral without disclosing that he spoke of himself.  Yet she had discovered it instantly.  He wondered if she had seen also the moral he intended to convey.

Alice Yorke was able to walk now, and many an afternoon Gordon Keith invited her to stroll with him on the mountain-side or up the Ridge, drawing her farther and farther as her strength returned.

The Spring is a dangerous season for a young man and a pretty girl to be thrown closely together for the first time, and the budding woods are a perilous pasture for their browsing thoughts.  It was not without some insight that the ancient poets pictured dryads as inhabitants of the woods, and made the tinkling springs and rippling streams the abiding-places of their nymphs.

The Spring came with a burst of pink and green.  The mountains took on delicate shades, and the trees blossomed into vast flowers, feathery and fine as lace.

An excursion in the budding woods has been dangerous ever since the day when Eve found a sinuous stranger lurking there in gay disguise, and was beguiled into tasting the tempting fruit he offered her.  It might be an interesting inquiry to collect even the most notable instances of those who, wandering all innocent and joyous amid the bowers, have found the honey of poisonous flowers where they meant only innocence.  But the reader will, perhaps, recall enough instances in a private and unrecorded history to fill the need of illustration.  It suffices, then, to say that, each afternoon that Gordon Keith wandered with Alice Yorke through the leafy woods, he was straying farther in that perilous path where the sunlight always sifts down just ahead, but the end is veiled in mist, and where sometimes darkness falls.

These strolls had all the charm for him of discovery, for he was always finding in her some new trait, and every one was, he thought, an added charm, even to her unexpected alternations of ignorance and knowledge, her little feminine outbreaks of caprice.  One afternoon they had strolled farther than usual, as far even as the high pines beyond which was the great rock looking to the northeastward.  There she had asked him to help her up to the top of the rock, but he had refused.  He told her that she had walked already too far, and he would not permit her to climb it.

“Not permit me!  Well, I like that!” she said, with a flash of her blue eyes; and springing from her seat on the brown carpet, before he could interpose, she was climbing up the high rock as nimbly as if she were a boy.