Outside, like fire engines running on velvet wheels, the automobiles went humming along the pavement. Inside, the soft, narrow, ribbony voice of a violin came whimpering through the rose-scented air.

It was the midst of dinner-party time. In the oak-paneled hallway a shadowy, tall clock swallowed gutturally on the verge of striking nine.

The moment was distinctly nervous. The entrÉe course was late, and the Hostess, gesticulating tragically to her husband, had slipped one chalky white shoulder just a fraction of an inch too far out of its jeweled strap. The Host, conversing every second with exaggerated blandness about the squirrels in Central Park, was striving frantically all the while with a desperately surreptitious, itchy gesture to signal to his mate. Worse than this, a prominent Sociologist was audibly discussing the American penal system with a worried-looking lady whose brother was even then under indictment for some banking fraud. Some one, trying to kick the Sociologist's ankle bone, had snagged his own foot gashingly through the Woodland Girl's skirt ruffle, and the Woodland Girl, blush-blown yet with country breezes, clear-eyed as a trout pool, sweet-breathed as balsam, was staring panic-stricken around the table, trying to locate the particular man's face that could possibly connect boot-wise with such a horridly profane accident. The sudden, grotesque alertness of her expression attracted the laggard interest of the young Journalist at her left.

"What brought you to New York?" the Journalist asked abruptly. "You're the last victim in from the country, so you must give an account of yourself. Come 'fess up! What brought you to New York?"

The Journalist's smile was at least as conscientious as the smile of daylight down a city airshaft, and the Woodland Girl quickened to the brightening with almost melodramatic delight, for all previous conversational overtures from this neighbor had been about actors that she had never heard of, or operas that she could not even pronounce, and before the man's scrutinizing, puzzled amazement she had felt convicted not alone of mere rural ignorance, but of freckles on her nose.

"What brought me to New York?" she repeated with vehement new courage. "Do you really want to know? It's quite a speech. What brought me to New York? Why, I wanted to see the 'heart of the city.' I'm twenty years old, and I've never in all my life been away from home before. Always and always I've lived in a log bungalow, in a wild garden, in a pine forest, on a green island, in a blue lake. My father is an invalid, you know, one of those people who are a little bit short of lungs but inordinately long of brains. And I know Anglo-Saxon and Chemistry and Hindoo History and Sunrises and Sunsets and Mountains and Moose, and such things. But I wanted to know People. I wanted to know Romance. I wanted to see for myself all this 'heart of the city' that you hear so much about—the great, blood-red, eager, gasping heart of the city. So I came down here last week to visit my uncle and aunt."

Her mouth tightened suddenly, and she lowered her voice with ominous intensity. "But there isn't any heart to, your city—no!—there is no heart at all at the center of things—just a silly, pretty, very much decorated heart-shaped box filled with candy. If you shake it hard enough, it may rattle, but it won't throb. And I hate—hate—hate your old city. It's utterly, hopelessly, irremediably jejune, and I'm going home to-morrow!" As she leaned toward the Journalist, the gold locket on her prim, high-necked gown swung precipitously forth like a wall picture in a furious little earthquake.

The Journalist started to laugh, then changed his mind and narrowed his eyes speculatively toward something across the room. "No heart?" he queried. "No Romance?"

The Woodland Girl followed his exploring gaze. Between the plushy green portiÈres a dull, cool, rose-colored vista opened forth refreshingly, with a fragment of bookcase, the edge of a stained glass window, the polished gleam of a grand piano, and then—lithe, sinuous, willowy, in the shaded lamplight—the lone, accentuated figure of a boy violinist. In the amazing mellow glow that smote upon his face, the Woodland Girl noted with a crumple at her heart the tragic droop of the boy's dark head, the sluggish, velvet passion of his eyes, the tortured mouth, the small chin fairly worn and burrowed away against his vibrant instrument. And the music that burst suddenly forth was like scalding water poured on ice—seething with anguish, shuddering with ecstasy, flame at your heart, frost at your spine.

The Girl began to shiver. "Oh, yes, I know," she whispered. "He plays, of course, as though he knew all sorrows by their first names, but that's Genius, isn't it, not Romance? He's such a little lad. He can hardly have experienced much really truly emotion as yet beyond a—stomach ache—or the loss of a Henty book."

"A stomach ache! A Henty book!" cried the Journalist, with a bitter, convulsive sort of mirth. "Well, I'm ready to admit that the boy is scarcely eighteen. But he happens to have lost a wife and a son within the past two months! While some of us country-born fellows of twenty-eight or thirty were asking our patient girls at home to wait even another year, while we came over to New York and tried our fortunes, this little youngster of scarcely eighteen is already a husband, a father, and a widower.

"He's a Russian Jew—you can see that—and one of our big music people picked him up over there a few months ago and brought him jabberingly to America. But the invitation didn't seem to include the wife and baby—genius and family life aren't exactly guaranteed to develop very successfully together—and right there on the dock at the very last sailing moment the little chap had to choose between a small, wailing family and a great big, clapping New York—just temporarily, you understand, a mere matter of immediate expediency; and families are supposed to keep indefinitely, you know, and keep sweet, too, while everybody knows that New York can go sour in a single night, even in the coldest weather. And just as the youngster was trying to decide, wavering first one way and then the other, and calling on high every moment to the God of all the Russias, the old steamer whistle began to blow, and they rustled him on board, and his wife and the kid pegged back alone to the province where the girl's father lived, and they got snarled up on the way with a band of Cossack soldiers, and the little chap hasn't got any one now even as far off as Russia to hamper his musical career.... So he's playing jig-tunes to people like us that are trying to forget our own troubles, such as how much we owe our tailors or our milliners. But sometimes they say he screams in the night, and twice he has fainted in the midst of a concert.

"No heart in the city? No Romance? Why, my dear child, this whole city fairly teems with Romance. The automobiles throb with it. The great, roaring elevated trains go hustling full of it. There's Romance—Romance—Romance from dawn to dark, and from dark to dawn again. The sweetness of the day-blooming sunshine, the madness of the night-blooming electric lights, the crowds, the colors, the music, the perfume—why, the city is Romance-mad! If you stop anywhere for even half an instant to get your breath, Romance will run right over you. It's whizzing past you in the air. It's whizzing past you in the street. It's whizzing past you in the sensuous, ornate theaters, in the jaded department stores, in the calm, gray churches. Romance?—Love?

"The only trouble about New York Romance lies just in the fact that it is so whizzingly premature. You've simply got to grab Love the minute before you've made up your mind—because the minute after you've made up your mind, it won't be there. Grab it—or lose it. Grab it—or lose it. That's the whole Heart-Motto of New York. Sinner or Saint—rush—rush—rush—like Hell!"

"Grab it—or lose it. Grab it, or—l-o-s-e it." Like the impish raillery of a tortured devil, the violin's passionate, wheedling tremolo seemed to catch up the phrase, and mouth it and mock it, and tear it and tease it, and kiss it and curse it—and smash it at last into a great, screeching crescendo that rent your eardrums like the crash of steel rails.

With strangely parched lips, the Woodland Girl stretched out her small brown hand to the fragile, flower-stemmed glass, and tasted for the first time in her life the sweety-sad, molten-gold magic of champagne. "Why, what is it?" she asked, with the wonder still wet on her lips. "Why, what is it?"

The Journalist raised his own glass with staler fingers, and stared for a second through narrowing eyes into the shimmering vintage. "What is it?" he repeated softly. "This particular brand? The Italians call it 'LacrymÆ Christi.' So even in our furies and our follies, in our cafÉs and carousals, in our love and all our laughter—we drink—you see—the—'Tears of Christ.'" He reached out suddenly and covered the Girl's half-drained glass with a quivering hand. "Excuse me," he stammered. "Maybe—our thirst is partly of the soul; but 'LacrymÆ Christi' was never meant for little girls like you. Go back to your woods!"

Scuttle as it might, the precipitate, naked passion in his voice did not quite have time to cover itself with word-clothes. A little gasping breath escaped. And though the Girl's young life was as shiningly empty as an unfinished house, her brain-cells were packed like an attic with all the inherent experiences of her mother's mother's mother, and she flinched instinctively with a great lurch of her heart.

"Oh, let's talk about something—dressy," she begged. "Let's talk about Central Park. Let's talk about the shops. Let's talk about the subway." Her startled face broke desperately into a smile. "Oh, don't you think the subway is perfectly dreadful," she insisted. "There's so much underbrush in it!" Even as she spoke, her shoulders hunched up the merest trifle, and her head pushed forward, after the manner of people who walk much in the deep woods. The perplexity in her eyes spread instantly to her hands. Among the confusing array of knives and forks and spoons at her plate, her fingers began to snarl nervously like a city man's feet through a tangle of blackberry vines.

With a good-natured shrug of his shoulders, the Journalist turned to his more sophisticated neighbor, and left her quite piteously alone once more. An enamored-looking man and woman at her right were talking transmigration of souls, but whenever she tried to annex herself to their conversation they trailed their voices away from her in a sacred, aloof sort of whisper. Across the table the people were discussing city politics in a most clandestine sort of an undertone. Altogether it was almost half an hour before the Journalist remembered to smile at her again. The very first flicker of his lips started her red mouth mumbling inarticulately.

"Were you going to say something?" he asked.

She shook her head drearily. "No," she stammered. "I've tried and tried, but I can't think of anything at all to say. I guess I don't know any secrets."

The Journalist's keen eyes traveled shrewdly for a second round the cautious, worldly-wise table, and then came narrowing back rather quizzically to the Woodland Girl's flushing, pink and white face.

"Oh, I don't know," he smiled. "You look to me like a little girl who might have a good many secrets."

She shook her head. "No," she insisted, "in all the whole wide world I don't know one single thing that has to be whispered."

"No scandals?" teased the Journalist.

"No!"

"No love affairs?"

"No!"

The Journalist laughed. "Why, what do you think about all day long up in your woods?" he quizzed.

"Anglo-Saxon and Chemistry and Hindoo History and Sunsets and Mountains and Moose," she repeated glibly.

"Now you're teasing me," said the Journalist.

She nodded her head delightedly. "I'm trying to!" she smiled.

The Journalist turned part way round in his chair, and proffered her a perfectly huge olive as though it had been a crown jewel. When he spoke again, his voice was almost as low as the voice of the man who was talking transmigration of souls. But his smile was a great deal kinder. "Don't you find any Romance at all in your woods?" he asked a bit drawlingly.

"No," said the Girl; "that's the trouble. Of course, when I was small it didn't make any difference; indeed, I think that I rather preferred it lonesome then. But this last year, somehow, and this last autumn especially—oh, I know you'll think I'm silly—but two or three times in the woods—I've hoped and hoped and hoped—at the turn of a trail, or the edge of a brook, or the scent of a camp fire—that I might run right into a real, live Hunter or Fisherman. And—one night I really prayed about it—and the next morning I got up early and put on my very best little hunting suit—all coats and leggings and things just like yours, you know—and I stayed out all day long—tramping—tramping—tramping, and I never saw any one. But I did get a fox. Yes!—and then—"

"And then what?" whispered the Journalist very helpfully.

The Girl began to smile, but her lips were quite as red as a blush. "Well—and—then," she continued softly, "it occurred to me all of a sudden that the probable reason why the Man-Who-Was-Meant-for-Me didn't come was because he—didn't know I was there!" She began to laugh, toying all the while a little bit nervously with her ice-cream fork. "So I thought that perhaps—if I came down to New York this winter—and then went home again, that maybe—not probably you know, but just possibly—some time in the spring or summer—I might look up suddenly through the trees and he would be there! But I've been ten days in New York and I haven't seen one single man whom I'd exactly like to meet in the woods—in my little hunting suit."

"Wouldn't you be willing to meet me?" pried the Journalist injudiciously.

The Girl looked up and faltered. "Why, of course," she hurried, "I should be very glad to see you—but I had always sort of hoped that the man whom I met in the woods wouldn't be bald."

The Journalist choked noisily over his salted almonds. His heightened color made him look very angry.

"Oh, I trust I wasn't rude," begged the Woodland Girl. Then as the Journalist's galloping laughter slowed down into the gentlest sort of a single-foot smile, her eyes grew abruptly big and dark with horror. "Why, I never thought of it," she stammered, "but I suppose that what I have just said about the man in the woods and my coming to New York is—'husband hunting.'"

The Journalist considered the matter very carefully. "N—o," he answered at last, "I don't think I should call it 'husband hunting' nor yet, exactly, 'the search for the Holy Grail'; but, really now, I think on the whole I should call it more of a sacrament than a sport."

"O—h," whispered the Girl with a little sigh of relief.

It must have been fully fifteen minutes before the Journalist spoke to her again. Then, in the midst of his salad course, he put down his fork and asked quite inquisitively: "Aren't there any men at all up in your own special Maine woods?"

"Oh, yes," the Girl acknowledged with a little crinkle of her nose, "there's Peter."

"Who's Peter?" he insisted.

"Why, Peter," she explained, "is the Philadelphia boy who tutors with my father in the summers."

Her youthfulness was almost as frank as fever, and, though taking advantage of this frankness seemed quite as reprehensible as taking advantage of any other kind of babbling delirium, the Journalist felt somehow obliged to pursue his investigations.

"Nice boy?" he suggested tactfully.

The Girl's nose crinkled just a little bit tighter.

The Journalist frowned. "I'll wager you two dozen squirrels out of Central Park," he said, "that Peter is head over heels in love with you!"

The Girl's mouth twisted a trifle, but her eyes were absolutely solemn. "I suppose that he is," she answered gravely, "but he's never taken the trouble to tell me so, and he's been with us three summers. I suppose lots of men are made like that. You read about it in books. They want to sew just as long—long—long a seam as they possibly can without tying any knot in the thread. Peter, I know, wants to make perfectly Philadelphia-sure that he won't meet any girl in the winters whom he likes better."

"I think that sort of thing is mighty mean," interposed the Journalist sympathetically.

"Mean?" cried the Girl. "Mean?" Her tousley yellow hair seemed fairly electrified with astonishment, and her big blue eyes brimmed suddenly with uproarious delight. "Oh, of course," she added contritely, "it may be mean for the person who sews the seam, but it's heaps of fun for the cloth, because after awhile, you know, Pompous Peter will discover that there isn't any winter girl whom he likes better, and in the general excitement of the discovery he'll remember only the long, long seam—three happy summers—and forget altogether that he never tied any knot. And then! And then!" her cheeks began to dimple. "And then—just as he begins triumphantly to gather me in—all my yards and yards and yards of beautiful freedom fretted into one short, puckery, worried ruffle—then—Hooray—swish—slip—slide—out comes the thread—and Mr. Peter falls right over bump-backward with surprise. Won't it be fun?"

"Fun?" snapped the Journalist. "What a horrid, heartless little cynic you are!"

The Girl's eyebrows fairly tiptoed to reach his meaning. "Cynic?" she questioned. "You surely don't mean that I am a cynic? Why, I think men are perfectly splendid in every possible way that—doesn't matter to a woman. They can build bridges and wage wars, and spell the hardest, homeliest words. But Peter makes life so puzzling," she added wryly. "Everybody wants me to marry Peter; everybody says 'slow but sure,' 'slow but sure.' But it's a lie!" she cried out hotly. "Slow is not sure. It is not! It is not! The man who isn't excited enough to run to his goal is hardly interested enough to walk. And yet"—her forehead crinkled all up with worry—"and yet—you tell me that 'quick' isn't sure, either. What is sure?"

"Nothing!" said the Journalist.

She tossed her head. "All the same," she retorted, "I'd rather have a man propose to me three years before, rather than three years after, I'd made up my mind whether to accept him or not."

"Don't—marry—Peter," laughed the Journalist.

"Why not?" she asked—so very bluntly that the Journalist twisted a bit uneasily.

"Oh—I—don't—know," he answered cautiously. Then suddenly his face brightened. "Any trout fishing up in your brooks about the first of May?" he asked covertly.

Again the knowledge of her mother's mother's mother blazed red-hot in the Girl's cheeks. "Y—e—s," she faltered reluctantly, "the trout-fishing is very generous in May."

"Will Peter be there?" persisted the Journalist.

Her eyes began to shine again with amusement. "Oh, no," she said. "Peter never comes until July." With mock dignity she straightened herself up till her shoulder almost reached the Journalist's. "I was very foolish," she attested, "even to mention Peter, or mankind—at all. Of course, I'm commencing to realize that my ideas about men are exceedingly countrified—'disgustingly countrified,' my aunt tells me. Why, just this last week at my aunt's sewing club I learned that the only two real qualifications for marriage are that a man should earn not less than a hundred dollars a week, and be a perfectly kind hooker."

"A perfectly kind hooker?" queried the Journalist.

"Why, yes," she said. "Don't you know—now—that all our dresses fasten in the back?" Her little tinkling, giggling laugh rang out with startling incongruity through the formal room, and her uncle glanced at her and frowned with the slightest perceptible flicker of irritation. She leaned her face a wee bit closer to the Journalist. "Now, uncle, for instance," she confided, "is not a particularly kind hooker. He's accurate, you understand, but not exactly kind."

The Journalist started to smile, but instantly her tip-most finger ends brushed across his sleeve. "Oh, please, don't smile any more," she pleaded, "because every time you smile you look so pleasant that some lady sticks out a remark like a hand and grabs you into her own conversation." But the warning came too late. In another moment the Journalist was most horridly involved with the people on his left in a prosy discussion regarding Japanese servants.

For another interminable length of time the Woodland Girl sat in absolute isolation. Some of the funerals at home were vastly more social, she thought—people at least inquired after the health of the survivors. But now, even after she had shredded all her lettuce into a hundred pieces and bitten each piece twice, she was still quite alone. Even after she had surreptitiously nibbled up all the cracker crumbs around her own plate and the Journalist's plate, she was still quite alone. Finally, in complete despair, she folded her little, brown, ringless hands and sat and stared frankly about her.

Across the sparkly, rose-reeking table a man as polished as poison ivy was talking devotedly to a white-faced Beauty in a most exciting gown that looked for all the world like the Garden of Eden struck by lightning—black and billowing as a thunder cloud, zigzagged with silver, ravished with rose-petals, rain-dropped with pearls. Out of the gorgeous, mysterious confusion of it the Beauty's bare shoulders leaped away like Eve herself fleeing before the storm. But beyond the extravagant sweep of gown and shoulder the primitive likeness ended abruptly in one of those utterly well-bred, worldly-wise, perfected young faces, with that subtle, indescribable sex-consciousness of expression which makes the type that men go mad over, and the type that older women tersely designate as looking just a little bit "too kissed."

But the Woodland Girl did not know the crumpled-rose-leaf stamp of face which characterizes the coquette. Utterly fascinated, tremulous with excitement, heartsick with envy, she reached out very softly and knocked with her finger on the Journalist's plate to beg readmission to his mind.

"Oh, who is that beautiful creature?" she whispered.

"Adele Reitzen," said the Journalist, "your uncle's ward."

"My own uncle's ward?" The Woodland Girl gave a little gasp. "But why does she worry so in her eyes every now and then?" she asked abruptly.

Even as she asked, Adele Reitzen began to cough. The trouble started with a trivial clearing of her throat, caught up a disjointed swallow or two, and ended with a rack that seemed to rip like a brutal knife right across her silver-spangled lungs. Somebody patted her on the back. Somebody offered her a glass of water. But in the midst of the choking paroxysm she asked to be excused for a moment and slipped away to the dressing-room. The very devoted man seemed rather piteously worried by the incident, and the Hostess looked straight into his eyes and shook her head ominously.

"I hope you are planning a southern wedding trip next week," she said. "I don't like that cough of Adele's. I've sat at three dinner parties with her this week, and each individual night she has had an attack like this and been obliged to leave the table."

In the moment's lull, the butler presented a yellow telegram on a shiny, Sheffield tray, and the Hostess slipped her pink fingers rustlingly through the envelope and brightened instantly. "Oh, here's a surprise for you, Chloe," she called to the Woodland Girl. "Peter is coming over to-night to see you." Like a puckering electric tingle the simple announcement seemed to run through the room, and a little wise, mischievous smile spread from face to face among the guests. In another instant everybody turned and peeped at the Woodland Girl, and the Woodland Girl felt her good cool, red blood turn suddenly to bubbling, boiling water, and steam in horrid, clammy wetness across her forehead and along the prickling palms of her hands, and the Journalist laughed right out loud, and the whole green, definite room swam dizzily like the flaunting scarlet messiness of a tropical jungle.

Every nook and corner of the house, indeed, was luxuriously heated, but when Adele Reitzen came sauntering back to her seat, pungent around her, telltale as an alien perfume, lurked the chill, fresh aroma of the wintry, blustering street. Only the country girl's smothering lungs noted the astonishing fact. Like a little caged animal scenting the blessed outdoors, her nostrils began to crinkle, and she straightened up with such abrupt alertness that she loomed to Adele Reitzen's startled senses like the only visible person at the table, and for just the fraction of a heart-beat the two girls fathomed down deep and understandingly into each other's eyes, before Adele Reitzen fluttered her white lids with a little piteous gesture of appeal.

Breathlessly the Woodland Girl turned to the Journalist, and touched his arm. "New York is interesting, isn't it!" she stammered. "I've decided just this minute to stay another week."

"Oh, ho," said the Journalist. "So you love it better than you did an hour ago?"

"No!" cried the Woodland Girl. "I love it worse. I love it worse every moment like a—ghost story, but I'm going to stick it out a week longer and see how it ends. And I've learned one clue to New York's plot this very night. I've learned that most every face is a 'haunted house.' The mouths slam back and forth all the time like pleasant doors, and the jolliest kind of speeches come prancing out, and all that—but in the eyes ghosts are peering out the windows every minute."

"Cheerful thought," said the Journalist, taking off his glasses. "Who's the ghost in my eyes?"

The Woodland Girl stared at him wonderingly. "The ghost in your eyes?" she blundered. "Why—I guess—it's 'the patient girl at home' whom you asked to wait 'even another year.'"

Like two fever spots the red flared angrily on the Journalist's cheek bones.

Not even the Journalist spoke to her again.

Finally, lonesome as a naughty child, she followed the dozen dinner guests back into the huge drawing-room, and wandered aimlessly around through the incomprehensible mysteries of Chinese idols and teakwood tabourets and soft, mushy Asiatic rugs. Then at last, behind a dark, jutting bookcase, in a corner most blissfully safe and secret like a cave, she stumbled suddenly upon a great, mottled leopard skin with its big, humpy head, and its sad glass eyes yearning out to her reproachfully. As though it had been a tiny, lost kitten, she gave a wee gasp of joy, and dropped down on the floor and tried to cuddle the huge, felt-lined, fur bulk into her lap. Just as the clumsy face flopped across her knees, she heard the quick swish of silk, and looked up to see Adele Reitzen bending over her.

The older girl's eyes were tortured with worry, and her white fingers teased perpetually at the jeweled watch on her breast. "Chloe Curtis," she whispered abruptly, "will you do something for me? Would you be afraid? You are visiting here in the house, so no one would question your disappearance. Will you go up to the dressing-room—quick—and get my black evening coat—the one with the gold embroidery and the big hood—and go out to the street corner where the cars stop—and tell the man who is waiting there—that I couldn't—simply couldn't—get out again? Would you be afraid?"

The Woodland Girl jumped to her feet. At that particular instant the lump in her throat seemed the only really insurmountable obstacle in the whole wide world. "Would I be afraid?" she scoffed. "Afraid of what? Of New York? Of the electric lights? Of the automobiles? Of the cross policemen? Afraid of nothing!" Her voice lowered suddenly. "Is it—Love?" she whispered.

The older girl's face was piteous to see. "Y—e—s," she stammered. "It is Love."

The Woodland Girl's eyes grew big with wonder. "But the other man?" she gasped. "You are going to be married next week!"

Adele Reitzen's eyes blurred. "Yes," she repeated, "I am going to be married next week." A little shiver went flickering across her shoulders.

The Woodland Girl's heart began to plunge and race. "What's the matter with the man out on the street corner?" she asked nervously.

Adele Reitzen caught her breath. "He's a civil engineer," she said. "His name is Brian Baird. He's just back from Central America. I met him on the steamer once. He was traveling second cabin. My—family—won't—let—me—have—him."

The Woodland Girl threw back her head and laughed, and smothered her laugh contritely with her hand. "Your family won't let you have him?" she mumbled. "What a funny idea! What has your family got to do about it?" Her breath began to quicken, and she reached out suddenly and clutched Adele Reitzen's shoulder. "Do you know where my uncle's musty old law library is?" she hurried. "It's downstairs, you know, close to the store room—nobody ever uses it. You go down there just as fast as you possibly can, and wait there, and I'll be back in five minutes with the—Love Man."

Before Adele Reitzen's feebler courage could protest, the Woodland Girl was scurrying up the short flight to the dressing-room and pawing like a prankish terrier through the neatly folded evening coats that snuggled across the bed. Tingling with excitement, she arrayed herself finally in the luxuriantly muffling black and gold splendor, and started cautiously down the long, creaky front stairs.

Like the inimitable, familiar thrill of little wild, phosphorescent eyes looming suddenly out of the black night-woods at home, the adventure challenged her impetuous curiosity. Bored puzzlingly by the big city's utter inability to reproduce the identical, simple lake-and-forest emotionalism that was the breath of life to her, she quickened now precipitately to the possible luring mystery in human eyes. Through the dark mahogany stripes of the balustrade, the drawing-room candles flared and sputtered like little finger-pinches of fluid flame, and the violin's shuddering voice chased after her, taunting, "Hurry! Hurry! Or it won't be there!" Beyond the lights and music, and the friendly creaking stairs, the strange black night opened forth like the scariest sort of a bottomless pit; but as yet, in all the girl's twenty coltish years nothing except headache and heart-beat had ever made her feel perfectly throbbing-positive that she was alive. She could spare the headache, but she could not spare the heart-beat. Paddling with muscle-strained shoulder and heaving breast across a November-tortured lake, or huddling under forbidden pine trees in a rackety August thunder storm, or floundering on broken snowshoes into the antlered presence of an astounded moose—Fun and Fear were synonymous to her.

Once on the street, like water to thirst, the cold night air freshened and vivified her. Over her head the electric lights twinkled giddily like real stars. On either side of her the huge, hulking houses reared up like pleasant imitation mountains. Her trailing cloak slipped now and then from her clutching fingers, but she trudged along toward the corner with just one simple, supreme sense of pleasurable excitement—somewhere out of the unfathomed shadows a real, live Adventure was going to rise up and scare her.

But the man, when he came, did not scare her one hundredth part as much as she scared him, though he jumped at her from the snuggling fur robe of a stranded automobile, and snatched at her arm with an almost bruising intensity.

"Oh, Adele," he cried huskily, "I thought you had failed me again."

The Woodland Girl threw back her somber hood and stood there all blonde and tousle-haired and astonishing under the electric light. "I'm not your Adele," she explained breathlessly. "I'm just Chloe Curtis. Adele sent me out to tell you that she absolutely couldn't—couldn't come. You yourself would have seen that it was horridly impossible. But you are to go back to the house now with me—to my uncle's old unused library and see Adele yourself for as much as fifteen minutes. No one—oh, I'm sure that no one—could persuade a woman to be brave—on a street corner; but I think that perhaps if you had a chance to see Adele all alone, she would be very—extraordinarily brave."

Anger, resentment, confusion, dismay flared like successive explosions in the man's face, and faded again, leaving his flesh utter ash gray.

"It was plucky of you to come," he muttered grimly, "but I haven't quite reached the point yet—thank you—where I go sneaking round people's unused rooms to meet any one!"

"Is it so very different from sneaking round street corners?" said the Woodland Girl.

The man's head lifted proudly. "I don't go 'sneaking' round street corners," he answered simply. "All Outdoors belongs to me! But I won't go secretly to any house that doesn't welcome me."

The Woodland Girl began to stamp her foot. "But the house does welcome you," she insisted. "It's my visity-house, and you are to come there as my friend."

In her ardor she turned and faced him squarely under the light, and winced to see how well worth facing he was—for the husband of a coward. There was no sleek New York about him, certainly, but rather the merge of all cities and many countries, a little breath of unusualness, a touch of mystery, a trifling suggestion, perhaps, of more dusty roads than smug pavements, twenty-eight or thirty years, surely, of adventurous youth. Impulsively she put out her hand to him. "Oh, please come," she faltered. "I—think you are so nice."

With a little laugh that had no amusement in it, nor pleasure, nor expectation, nor any emotion that the Woodland Girl had ever experienced, he stood and stared at her with some sudden impulse. "Does Adele really want me to come?" he asked trenchantly.

"Why yes," insisted the Woodland Girl. "It's life or death for you and Adele."

Ten minutes later, standing on guard at the edge of the library door, the Woodland Girl heard, for the first time in her life, the strange, low, vibrant, mysterious mate-tone of a human voice. If she had burrowed her head in a dozen pillows, she could not have failed to sense the amazing wonder of the sound, though the clearer-worded detail of hurried plans and eager argument and radiant acquiescence passed by her unobserved. "But I must be perfectly sure that you love me," persisted the man's voice.

"You and—you only," echoed the woman's passion.

Then suddenly, like a practical joke sprung by a half-witted Fate, the store room door opened with casual, exploring pleasantness, and the Journalist and Adele Reitzen's promised husband and big Peter himself stepped out into the hallway.

Before the surprised greeting in two men's faces the Woodland Girl retreated step by step, until at last with a quick turn she whirled back into the dingy, gas-lit library—her chalky face, her staring eyes proclaiming only too plainly the calamity which she had no time to stuff into words.

Close behind her followed the three smiling, unsuspicious intruders. Even then the incident might have passed without gross awkwardness if the Woodland Girl's uncle and aunt had not suddenly joined the company. From the angry, outraged flush on the two older faces it was perfectly evident that these two, at least, had been waylaid by kitchen gossip.

Brian Baird laughed. Like a manly lover goaded and hectored and cajoled too long into unworthy secrecy, his pulses fairly jumped to meet the frank, forced issue. But with a quick, desperate appeal Adele Reitzen silenced the triumphant speech on his lips. "Let me manage it!" she whispered, so vehemently that the man yielded to her, and stepped back against the fireplace, and spread his arms with studied, indolent ease along the mantel, like a rustic cross tortured out of a supple willow withe. One of his hands played teasingly with a stale spray of Christmas greens. Nothing but the straining, white-knuckled grip of his other hand modified the absolute, wilful insolence of his pose.

As for Adele, her face was ghastly.

With crude, uncontrolled venom the Woodland Girl's aunt plunged into the emergency. "Adele," she cried shrilly, "I think you owe your fiancÉ an explanation! You promised us faithfully last year that you would never, never see Mr. Baird again—and now to-night our chauffeur saw you steal out to the street corner to meet him—like a common shop-girl. And you dare to bring him back—to my house! What have you to say for yourself?"

For the fraction of a moment Adele Reitzen's superb beauty straightened up to its full majestic height, and all the love-pride that was in her white, white flesh flamed gloriously in her face. Then her sleek, prosperous, arrogant city lover stepped suddenly forward where the yellow light struck bleakly across his shrewd, small eyes and his thin, relentless mouth.

"I should be very glad, indeed, to hear what you have to say," he announced, and his voice was like a nicked knife blade.

Flush by flush by flush the red glory fled from Adele Reitzen's face. Her throat began to flutter. Her knees crumpled under her. Fear went over her like a gray fog.

With one despairing hand she reached back to the Woodland Girl. "Oh, tell them it was you," she whispered hotly. "Oh, tell them it was you." Her scared face brightened viciously. "It was you—you know! Tell them—oh, tell them anything—only save me!"

The Woodland Girl's eyes were big with horror. She started to speak, she started to protest, but before the jumbled words could leave her lips Adele Reitzen turned to the others and blurted out hysterically:

"Surely I can't be expected to keep even a love-secret under these—distressing circumstances. It was Chloe who went out to the street corner to-night—like a common shop-girl—to meet Brian Baird. She wore my cloak on purpose to disguise her."

Like the blaring scream of a discordant trumpet, the treacherous, flatted truth crashed into the Woodland Girl's startled senses, and the man in the shape of a sagging willow cross started up and cried out, "My God!"

For a second the Woodland Girl stood staring into his dreadful, chaotic face, then she squared her shoulders and turned to meet the wrathful, contemptuous surprise in her uncle's and aunt's features.

"So it was you," sneered the uncle, "embroiling our decent household in a common, vulgar intrigue?"

"So it was you," flamed her aunt, "you who have been posing all these days as an Innocent?"

Frantic with perplexity, muddled with fear, torn by conflicting chivalries, the Woodland Girl stared back and forth from Adele Reitzen's agonized plea to the grim, inscrutable gleam in Brian Baird's eyes. As though every living, moving verb had been ripped out of that night's story, and all the inflexible nouns were printing themselves slam-bang one on top of another—Roses, Wine, Music, Silver, Diamonds, Fir-Balsam telescoped each other in her senses.

"Your father sent you down here," persisted her aunt brutally, "on the private plea to me that he was planning to be married again—but I can readily see that perhaps no one would exactly want you."

The Woodland Girl's heart began to pound.

"We—are—waiting," prodded her uncle's icy voice.

Suddenly the Girl's memory quickened. Once, long ago, her father had said to her: "Little Daughter, if you are ever in fear and danger by sea or land—or city, which is neither sea nor land—turn always to that man, and to that man only, whom you would trust in the deep woods. Put your imagination to work, not your reason. You have no reason!"

Desperately she turned to Peter. His face, robbed utterly of its affection, was all a-shock with outraged social proprieties, merging the merest bit unpleasantly into the racy appreciation of a unique adventure. Panic-stricken, she turned to the Journalist. Already across the Journalist's wine-flushed face the pleasant, friendly smile was souring into worldly skepticism and mocking disillusionment.

She shut her eyes. "O Big Woods, help me!" she prayed. "O Cross Storm, warn me! O Rough Trail, guide me!"

Behind her tightly scrunched lids her worried brain darkened like a jumbled midnight forest. Jaded, bedraggled, aching with storm and terror, she saw herself stumbling into the sudden dazzling splurge of a stranger's camp fire. Was it a man like Peter? Was it the Journalist? She began to shiver. Then her heart gave a queer, queer jump, and she opened her eyes stark wide and searched deep into Brian Baird's livid face. One of his hands still strained at the wooden mantel. The other still bruised the pungent balsam tip between its restive fingers. His young hair was too gray about his temples. His shoulders were too tired with life's pack burdens. His eyes had probably grown more bitter that night than any woman's lips could ever sweeten again. And yet—

Down from the far-away music room floated the quavering, passionate violin wail of the boy who had dared to temporize with Fate. Up from the close-nudging street crashed the confusing slap of hoofs and the mad whir of wheels racing not so much for the Joy of the Destination as for the Thrill of the Journey. She gave a little gasping sob, and Brian Baird stooped forward incredulously, as though from the yellow glare of his camp fire he had only just that instant sensed the faltering footfall of a wayfarer in acute distress, and could scarcely distinguish even yet through the darkness the detailed features of the apparition.

For a second, startled eyes defied startled eyes, and then suddenly, out of his own meager ration of faith or fortune or immediate goodness, the man straightened up, and smiled—the simple, honest, unquestioning camp-fire smile—the smile of food and blanket, the smile of welcome, the smile of shelter, the signal of the gladly-shared crust—and the Woodland Girl gave a low, wild cry of joy, and ran across the room to him, and wheeled back against him, close, tight, with her tousled hair grazing his haggard cheek and her brown hands clutching hard at the sweep of his arms along the mantel.

"Adele Reitzen is right," she cried out triumphantly. "This is my—man!"