was burning on the site of the old man's little cooking-fire a cheerful
blaze of size. Its rushing warmth was very grateful to her, and she held
her hands out to it, then her feet, one after the other, with skirts
lifted daintily, so that her chilled limbs might catch the warmth.

Invigorated by the pleasant heat, she once more yielded to the urgings
of the bounding spirit of rich youth within her. Even as she had sported
in the water ere the interloper came to interrupt her sylvan bath, now
she sported there about the fire in an impromptu dance, never for a
second uncouth, despite the fact that she was quite untrained; scarcely
less graceful than her merrymaking in the water, although then she had
not been, as now, hampered in her grace of movement by the unlovely
draperies of homespun linsey-woolsey. As she had been a water-nymph, so,
now, she might have been some Druid maid dancing by an altar fire. The
roughness of the ground did not annoy her--her feet had not known
dancing upon polished waxen wood; the lack of spectators did not deter
her--those whom she had learned to know and love, the mountains, trees,
the squirrels, and birds, were there.

In the very midst of the abandon of this rustic symphony of movement,
the thought came to her that the precious spelling-book was lying on the
rock, near by, quite soaked, neglected. She sped to it and took it to
the fire's edge, where, opening its pages one by one, so that each would
get the warmth, she held it as close as she opined was safe. Having
dried it until she no longer feared the wetting it had had would
seriously harm its usefulness (the lovely smoothness of its magic leaves
was gone, alas! beyond recall) she paused there for a moment, herself
still far from dry, with a bare foot held out to the blaze, and studied
curiously one of the book's pages.