picked up a few pebbles and threw them into the wood, glanced back at
Lance with swimming mottled eyes, that seemed a piquant incarnation of
everything suggestive and tantalizing, and said:
"That's telling."
They had by this time reached the spot where they were to separate.
"Look," said Flip, pointing to a faint deflection of their path, which
seemed, however, to lose itself in the underbrush a dozen yards away,
"ther's your trail. It gets plainer and broader the further you get on,
but you must use your eyes here, and get to know it well afore you get
into the fog. Good-by."
"Good-by." Lance took her hand and drew her beside him. She was still
redolent of the spices of the thicket, and to the young man's excited
fancy seemed at that moment to personify the perfume and intoxication
of her native woods. Half laughingly, half earnestly, he tried to kiss
her: she struggled for some time strongly, but at the last moment
yielded, with a slight return and the exchange of a subtle fire that
thrilled him, and left him standing confused and astounded as she ran
away. He watched her lithe, nymph-like figure disappear in the
checkered shadows of the wood, and then he turned briskly down the
half-hidden trail. His eyesight was keen, he made good progress, and
was soon well on his way toward the distant ridge.
But Flip's return had not been as rapid. When she reached the wood she
crept to its beetling verge, and looking across the canon watched
Lance's figure as it vanished and reappeared in the shadows and
sinuosities of the ascent. When he reached the ridge the outlying fog
crept across the summit, caught him in its embrace, and wrapped him
from her gaze. Flip sighed, raised herself, put her alternate foot on a
stump, and took a long pull at her too-brief stockings. When she had
pulled down her skirt and endeavored once more to renew the intimacy
that had existed in previous years between the edge of her petticoat
and the top of her stockings, she sighed again, and went home.
CHAPTER III.
|