The most perfect of the summer months in this secluded mountain nook, not inaptly named "Eden" by Standing, was a period of time measuring itself in soft, fragrant loveliness. The days were balmy, perfect, halcyon; gentle hours of blue cloudlessness and golden sunshine and little breezes which scarcely ruffled the clear water in the bigger pools; night as clear as crystal, with flaring stars like distant torches above the yellow pine tops; nature in her gentlest mood here among the ruggedness of the wilderness, expressing herself in the most delightful of odors wafted through the woods, in the tenderest tiniest blossoms of wild flowers; a time of infinite hush and infinite solitude and peace.
To have chafed and been unhappy here, to a spirit like either Bruce Standing's or Lynette Brooke's, would have seemed next door to an impossibility. Even the girl, though restrained, a prisoner of a man's will when the bright star of her life had ever been one of splendid independence, found it easier to smile or laugh aloud at the sober-faced antics of Thor ... when she and Thor were alone with none to see!... than to sigh. She knew her periods of restiveness and bitter rebellion; they were due not to her environment, but to the thought that another than herself was dictating to her. But for one reason or another these periods were rarer and briefer than her other hours of a strange sort of peacefulness.
"It's because I've been worn out and only now am resting," she tried to tell herself. "Recuperating from a condition of exhausted mind and body."
Thus four days and nights passed. There had been, during all that time, not the slightest opportunity to
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 escape. The first day Standing had hurled the chain from him, as far as he could send it. But he had not lost sight of her for more than a few minutes at a time, saving such times that she gave him her promise that she would wait for him to come back. He accepted her word as he expected all the world to accept his. On other occasions, when he allowed her briefer freedoms, he had said merely: "No chance to run for it, girl! I'd overtake you, you know, in no time. Even if you hid, here'd be old Thor, nosing you out!" Then he laughed, adding: "For his own sake, the renegade, as well as for his master's! He's fallen in love with you, too." He made her bed in the rock-and-tree grotto; he labored, one-handed, over it for hours. With his heavy clasp knife he cut the tender tips of resinous branches; he heaped them high; he covered all with great handfuls of fragrant grass, thick with the tall red flowers that grew down by the creek, odorous with the tender white blossoms which shyly lifted their little heads to dot the grassy slopes.... He made her a bathing-pool: stiff and sore all up and down his left side, he worked with his right hand, dragging big boulders up out of their ancient beds, piling them in a ring about the pool, plastering them over the top with great handfuls of that carpet-like moss which thrived in these cool places.
"If you'd let me go!"
"No; not yet.... What man can read the mind of a girl? How do I know what you would do? Where you would go? My wounds are healing; until they heal I am only half a man. You might whisk away from me, I tell you; and I'd have to follow and seek you, if you led me through hell on the way to heaven; and I must be whole again. And I've got to get everything straight...."
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Always when he left her he returned before the end of the time she had promised to wait for him. And always he sent, as herald of his approach, his golden voice forward to her. At times in an echoing shout. More than once in an outburst of singing which thrilled her strangely. What a voice the man had! And once, when he had elected to bathe in the starlight, he sent down to her that cry which she had heard the first time from the door of Babe Deveril's cabin in Big Pine ... the wild, fierce call of the timber-wolf which, despite her naming herself "fool," sent a shiver into her blood.... Once this happened: He had left her in the forenoon, accepting her word that she would not stir until high noon. Usually he came well in advance; this time she watched the climbing sun and the creeping shade and suddenly her heart began its wild beating; it was almost noon and he was not here; no sound of his coming. When he shouted to her and then came rushing into camp, he found that she had been working frenziedly with a stick and a stone; driving the sliver of wood like a stake into the ground.... She started up, her face crimson.
"Well?" he said, his hands on his hips, staring down at her. "What's that?"
She blurted out the explanation and then was angry with herself for telling him. She had meant to stay until the tip end of the giant pine's shadow fell where it marked midday; she had meant there to drive in her stake; for him it would be a marker, an assurance from her that she had kept her word with him, that she had waited as she had promised to wait ... that then, scorning him, she had snatched at her rights and had fled!
His first impulse was toward laughter. And then, strangely quiet, he stood looking at her and she saw a gathering mist in his eyes!
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"Girl!" he muttered. "Oh, girl!... God, I love you!"
"I hate you...."
... How many times had she cried out in those words! And how much of that did she mean? In her heart, in her soul ... in the most hidden recesses of her most hidden being?
Thus she had hours to herself. And, therefore, had Bruce Standing hours to himself. For he wanted them. He wanted to be away from her, where he could not see her, could not hear that low music of her voice, could not catch that soft lure of her eyes, could not be tempted to have it happen that his rude hand brushed her hand.... Her hand, though she had been all these days and nights outdoors, roughing it, seemed to him a maddening realm of crumpled rose-leaves ... pink-and-white rose-leaves. He left her, secure in her pledge that she would wait for him, and threw himself down on his back and stared up through slowly shifting branches and mused on her. He thought how like a flower she was, the queen of flowers ... and he could have wept that he was so big and ungentle. He thought of Babe Deveril, and cursed him for being so slender and debonair; graceful and light of mood; gentle-voiced, with the knack of pretty words to pretty ladies. And Babe Deveril had befriended her; stood champion to her against him! He ground his teeth. He leaped up and paced back and forth, forgetful of all such insignificant nothings as trifling wounds of the flesh. He recalled how, man to man, he had broken Babe Deveril, and he laughed out loud.... Yet it remained that Babe Deveril had stood her friend and protector when he had pursued them both, linking them but the closer, with his wrath. She and Deveril had travelled together, side by side and hand in hand, miles and other miles of the open
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solitudes; they had been drawn close together, driven closer together. He, Bruce Standing, Timber-Wolf, and Fool, had done that! And what spark had been struck out of the flint of the adversity which he had hurled at them?... Had they loved ... had they kissed ... was she now longing with a sick heart for the return of Babe Deveril?
"Oh, Lord!" he cried out, his great iron fingers crooking as his arms were thrown out. "Deliver him into these hands!"
Lynette had no mirror. Standing began to grow a lusty young beard, as blond as his hair, shot through with red gleams. She knew the need of fresh clothing. When he was away she did her washing as best she could, pounding garments against the rocks in the creek; she dried them and hid them and donned them without his knowing ... though of course he knew as she knew that he did his own rude washings. There was a spring at the side of the cañon, one of the many sources which fed the stream; a shadowed, tranquil place. Of this she made her pier-glass! She stooped and looked down into its glassily smooth surface. It gave back her own image; it reflected the dark green of the pines, the lighter green of the willows. Even the subdued colors of her worn suit. She washed her hair and groomed it; no comb, no brush, but agile fingers. Most of all, when secure through his promise in return for her own, did she enjoy her plunge in the pool he had made for her. The slender whiteness of her slipped hastily down under the translucent cover of the cool, flowing water; she was as swift in her movements as any slim-bodied trout that darted about her, scurrying into its retreat; the water shot a thrill through her; she emerged, dripping, charged with all the electric currents of well-being.
"If this were only a holiday ... instead of imprisonment!"
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She, too, thought of Babe Deveril, as was inevitable. And in many ways: One, always recurrent, was: "Could she have been as sure of Babe Deveril as she was of Bruce Standing? As secure in her utter conviction of safety?" And here was a question to which she found no ready answer. Babe Deveril, leaping full-breastedly into the stream which had swept her off her feet, had been a friend to her from the beginning; from the beginning Bruce Standing had been a menace.
... Best of all she loved the waterfall. It was her shower-bath. But, more than that, it was her friend and confidante, and, beyond aught else, a living, glimmering, varicolored thing of gossamer beauty. It talked with her, it was at once handmaiden and musician and troubadour; it plashed and sang and poured its cadences into quiet harmonies which sank into her soul. It had leapt and sparkled and poured itself onward unstintedly, unafraid, for a thousand years; for a thousand years would it keep up its merry dancings, uncaring if only the tall pines watched or if men and maids brought hither their loves and hates and hopes and fears. Unstable it was always, always falling; secure was it in its diaphanous veilings of its own merry immortality. She loved it for its abandon, for its recklessness, for its translucent myriad beauties. It lived; it sang and sparkled; it filled the moment with musical murmurings and recked not of all those vague threats and shadows of a vague future.... She sat here, quiet under the spell of its dashings and splashings and eerie flutings ... musing, her soul drawn forth into all those vague and troublous musings which beset the heart of youth.
Youth? Young, too, was Bruce Standing! He hearkened to the cascading waters; he listened to the harp-tongued whisperings of the pines.... He had done everything wrong; he told himself that a thousand, thousand times. Yet he told himself savagely that
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 throughout the insanities, the veritable madnesses of constricted human life there flowed always, onward and sweepingly upward, the great, triumphal, eternal forces of destiny. And, in the end ... in the end ... it all made for good. For eternal and triumphant good.
... After all, but the old, old story of man and maid, converging to the one gleaming, focal point though across distances oceans-wide removed.
He had his point of view; Lynette Brooke had her point of view. Yet it remains that from two widely separated peaks two eager hearts may see the same sun rise.
"Tell me," he said once. "What manner of man is this Babe Deveril? I know him as a man may know a man; you know him otherwise. Tell me; what have you found him to be?"
Never would she have been Lynette, had she not been ever quick of instinct ... instinct leaping, never looking, yet so certain to strike true! She read the thought under a thought; there came a living, joyous gloating; she cried warmly, all the while watching him:
"A true friend and a gentleman! A man unafraid ... one like a loyal knight of the olden time! Like one of the King Arthur's knights...."
"Like one," he growled, deep down in his throat, angrily, "who saw another Lynette across the four fords? That's not true, girl; else he would not have forsaken you so long! Nor would he have given up so easily when, in your view, I beat him down and sent him up over the ridge!"
"He'll come back!"
"You think so?"
"I know!"
Chance remarks of hers ... this one above all others ... rankled. She seemed so confident that Babe Deveril would come again, that he would carry in his
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 breast the memory of sweet hours with her, that he would never rest until he, with her pleading eyes tender upon his, could rescue her from the bondage which Bruce Standing had set upon her! So it came about that nightly, and all night long, Bruce Standing dreamed of Babe Deveril and of battling with him and of beating him finally into such definite defeat as had not resulted from that other fierce struggle before her widening eyes.
Another day went by and another, with Bruce Standing obsessed, knowing himself for a man who yearned with all his soul for one thing and one thing only, a mere slip of a gray-eyed girl who made madness in his pulses. He had his moods of fierceness; on their heels came those other moods of tenderness. More than once he came toward her, striding through the woods, his mind made up to set her free, asking only her happiness. And then he saw her; and in his heated fancies he saw Babe Deveril; and he named Deveril a man of slight manhood and swore by his own manhood that never would he show so lax and flabby a hand as to let this priceless girl, drop into the graceful, careless hand of any Babe Deveril who ever lived.
"He'd never know how to love her as I do!" That ancient cry of all true lovers!
But all the while there bit into him doubtings,............