"And Miss Denham?" said Lynde, drawing a scarcely repressed breath of
relief.

"Oh, Ruth can go if she likes," replied Mrs. Denham, "provided it is not
too far."

"It is hardly an eighth of a mile across," said Lynde. "You will find us
waiting for you at the opposite end of the cut, unless you drive
rapidly. It is more than a mile by the road."

"Do you wish to go, Ruth?"

Miss Denham hesitated an instant, and then answered by rising
impulsively and giving her hand to Lynde. Evidently, her first intention
had been to refuse. In a moment more she was standing beside him, and
the carriage was lazily crawling up the hill with Mrs. Denham looking
back through her glass at the cascade.

A dozen rude steps, partly artificial and partly formed by the strata of
the limestone bank, led from the roadside up to the opening of the foot-
way. For thirty or forty yards the fern-fringed path was too narrow to
admit of two persons walking abreast. Miss Denham, with her skirts
gathered in one hand, went first, picking her way over the small loose
stones rendered slippery by the moss, and Lynde followed on in silence,
hardly able to realize the success of the ruse which had come so near
being a failure. His companion was equally preoccupied. Once she stopped
for Lynde to detach her dress from a grasping twig, and once to pluck
one of those pallid waxen flowers which sometimes dauntlessly find a
footing even among the snowdrifts of the higher Alps. The air was full
of the resinous breath of the pines, whose boughs, meeting and