to frighten her. The Arbutus gallantry he had considered strategic and
poetic. There was the baffling thing about her that kept him piqued.
She was always shy and elusive. Of convention she knew nothing at all;
yet like the shrine in the garret she kept herself apart and precious.
Always she seemed fluttering just ahead of him, like a will-of-the-wisp.
If he touched her hand ever so gently she drew it away. The caresses
most girls he had known would have understood and accepted as part of the
summer idyl, he knew, instinctively, would be evaded.

Ah! the truth of it was she was an incomprehensible torment of delight.
For she roamed the fields and woods with him gladly, lunched in glens
remote it seemed from everything but the call of that infernal horn,
yielded to the enthusiasm of his maddest moods, romped with him like a
kitten or a child--and kept miraculously the poise and reticence of a
woman. She talked freely of her brother; never of her uncle.

He was quick and impressionable, this gifted Irishman, with a trace of
the melancholy of his race and all of its cheer. Melancholy was the one
mood in which Joan did not seem to flutter just ahead. Always then she
followed, gentle, compassionate and shyly tender. He was quick to find
it out and wily enough to feign it when in reality his heart was as light
and buoyant as a feather.

Save for the call of the horn beneath the willow, the girl was as free to
come and go as an oriole in the orchard; for that he was grateful. But
whether Adam Craig's attitude was one of trust or cold indifference, he
could not fathom. With Hughie and Hannah it was different. They loved
Joan and trusted him. That trust, he resolved, should not be futile. He
could justify it and he would. Joan, of course, was foredoomed to know
the delirium of the heart that had come to him that day beneath the