"But Nellie--"

"I tell you no," she said, with an almost harsh practical decision,
incompatible with her previous abandonment. "We might be seen together."

"Well, suppose we are; we must be seen together eventually," he
remonstrated.

The young girl made an involuntary gesture of impatient negation, but
checked herself. "Don't let us talk of that now. Come, while I am here
under your own roof--" she pointed to the high interlaced boughs above
them--"you must be hospitable. Show me your home; tell me, isn't it a
little gloomy sometimes?"

"It never has been; I never thought it WOULD be until the moment you
leave it to-day."

She pressed his hand briefly and in a half-perfunctory way, as if her
vanity had accepted and dismissed the compliment. "Take me somewhere,"
she said inquisitively, "where you stay most; I do not seem to see you
HERE," she added, looking around her with a slight shiver. "It is so big
and so high. Have you no place where you eat and rest and sleep?"

"Except in the rainy season, I camp all over the place--at any spot
where I may have been shooting or collecting."

"Collecting?" queried Nellie.

"Yes; with the herbarium, you know."