God's Country--And the Woman

white arm, still moist with the water of the pool, taking in the wide, autumn-tinted spaces about them.

"I am alone," she repeated, still keeping her eyes on his face. "Entirely alone. That is why you startled me--why I was afraid. This is my hiding-place, and I thought--"

He saw that she had spoken words that she would have recalled. She hesitated. Her lips trembled. In that moment of suspense a little gray ermine dislodged a stone from the rock ridge above them, and at the sound of it as it struck behind her the girl gave a start, and a quick flash of the old fear leaped for an instant into her face. And now Philip beheld something in her which he had been too bewildered and wonder-struck to observe before. Her first terror had been so acute that he had failed to see what remained after her fright had passed. But it was clear to him now, and the look that came into his own face told her that he had made the discovery.

The beauty of her face, her eyes, her hair--the wonder of her presenc