gazing down upon its polished surface. Soon she dipped the toe of one
brown, slender foot into it, evidently prepared to draw back hastily in
case of too low temperature, but tempted, when she found the water warm,
she gently thrust the whole foot in, and then, gathering her skirt
daintily up to her knees, actually stepped into the water, wading with
little shrill screams of delight.

For a moment she stood poised there, both hands busy with her skirt,
which was pulled back tight against her knees. Then, after another hasty
glance around, she sprang out upon the bank with a quick gesture of
determination, and, close by the thicket's edge, disrobed entirely and
came back to the water as lovely as the dream of any ancient sculptor,
as alluring as the finest fancy of the greatest painter who has ever
touched a brush.

Slim, graceful, sinuous, utterly unconscious of her loveliness, but
palpitating with the sensuous joy of living, she might have been a wood
nymph, issuing vivid, vital, from the fancy of a mediaeval poet. The
sunlight flecked her beautiful young body with fluttering patches as of
palpitant gold leaf. The crystal water splashed in answer to the play of
her lithe limbs and fell about her as in showers of diamonds. Flowers
and ferns upon the pool's edge, caught by the little waves of overflow,
her sport sent shoreward, bowed to her as in a merry homage to her
grace, her fitness for the spot and for the sport to which she now
abandoned herself utterly, plunging gaily into the deepest waters of the
basin. From side to side of its narrow depths she sped rapidly, the
blue-white of the spring water showing her lithe limbs in perfect grace
of motion made mystically indefinite and shimmering by refraction
through the little rippling waves her progress raised. She raced and
strained, from the pure love of effort, as if a stake of magnitude