"Don't do it, Miss Wream," Vincent Burgess pleaded.

Elinor looked from the one to the other, and the very magnetism
of power called her.

"I mean to try, anyhow," she declared. "Will you pick me up
if I fall, Victor?"

"Well, I wouldn't hardly go away and leave you to perish miserably,"
Vic assured her, and they were off together.

The Wream men were slender, and all of them, except Lloyd Fenneben,
the stepbrother, wore nose glasses and drank hot water at breakfast, and ate
predigested foods, and talked of acids and carbons, and took prescribed
gestures for exercise. The joyousness of perfect health was in every
motion of this young man. His brown sweater showed a hard white throat.
He planted his feet firmly. And he leaped up the bluffside easily.
If Elinor slipped, the strength of his grip on her arm reassured her,
until climbing beside him became a joy.

The bluff was less surly than it appeared to be down in the Corral,
and the benediction of autumn was in the view from its crest.
They sat down on the stone ledge crowning it, and Elinor threw
aside her jaunty scarlet outing cap. The breezes played
in her dark hair, and her cheeks were pink from the exercise.
Victor Burleigh looked at her with frank, wide-open eyes.

"What's the matter? Is my hair a fright?" she murmured.

"A fright!" Burleigh flung off his cap and ran his fingers