“You drove Scott’s Blue Racer yesterday so fast that Felix came to me about it,” said Kathleen gently.

Geraldine laughed.  “It couldn’t go fast enough, dear; that was the only trouble.”  Then, serious and wistful:  “If I could only have Duane....  Don’t be alarmed; I can’t—­yet.  But if I only could have him now!  You see, his life is already very full; his work is absorbing him.  It would absorb me.  I don’t know anything about it technically, but it interests me.  If I could only have him now; think about him every second of the day—­to keep me from myself——­”

She checked herself; suddenly her eyes filled, her lip quivered: 

“I want him now!” she said desperately.  “He could save me; I know it!  I want him now—­his love, his arms to keep me safe at night!  I want him to love me—­love me!  Oh, Kathleen! if I could only have him!”

A delicate colour tinted Kathleen’s face; her ears shrank from the girl’s low-voiced cry, with its glimmer of a passion scarcely understood.

Long, long, the memory of his embrace had tormented her—­the feeling of happy safety she had in his arms—­the contact that thrilled almost past endurance, yet filled her with a glorious and splendid strength—­that set wild pulses beating, wild blood leaping in her veins—­that aroused her very soul to meet his lips and heed his words and be what his behest would have her.

And the memory of it now possessed her so that she stood straight and slim and tall, trembling in the forest path, and her dark eyes looked into Kathleen’s with a strange, fiery glimmer of pride: 

“I need him, but I love him too well to take him.  Can I do more for him than that?”

“Oh, my darling, my darling,” said Kathleen brokenly, “if you believe that he can save you—­if you really feel that he can——­”

“I am trying to save myself—­I am trying.”  She turned and looked off through the forest, a straight, slender shape in the moving shadows of the leaves.

“But if he could really help you—­if you truly believe it, dear, I—­I don’t know whether you might not venture—­now——­”

“No, dear.”  She slowly closed her eyes, remained motionless for a moment, drew a deep, long breath, and looked up through the sunlit branches overhead.

“I’ve got to be fair to him,” she said aloud to herself; “I must give myself to him as I ought to be, or not at all....  That is settled.”

She turned to Kathleen and took her hand: 

“Come on, fellow-pilgrim,” she said with an effort to smile.  “My cowardice is over for the present.”

A few steps forward they sighted Scott coming back.  He was unusually red in the face and rather excited, and he flourished a stick.

“Of all the infernal impudence!” he said.  “What do you think has happened to me?  I saw a wild boar back there—­not a very big one—­and he came out into the trail ahead, and I kept straight on, thinking he’d hear me and run.  And I’m blessed if the brute didn’t whirl around and roughen up, and clatter his tusks until I actually had to come to a halt!”