Creeping forward on hands and knees he made his way silently through the bushes. He knew the trick of the beasts; knew how to pad the underbrush beneath his hands before he trusted the weight of his body to it. When within a few feet of the spot whence the sound of moving came, Sandy started up and dashed with one bound into the open. His hands were spread wide with eagerness to grip that which had betrayed him, and so he came upon--Cynthia Walden! He fell back panting, when his brain, at last, interpreted for him what he saw. The girl sat with the tin box of money in her lap; the overturned stone beside her and the last rays of the hot sun filtering through the dogwood trees and pines upon her sweet, pale beauty. By a sharp trick of memory Sandy recalled how the dogwood blossoms one spring long past had looked like stars under the dark pines and now he thought that Cynthia's face was like the pale, starry blossoms. He was always to remember her so when, in the hard years on before, she was to come to him in fancy and longing. A pure girl-face, radiant with hope and bravery, touched, just then, with startled fear which faded into laughing triumph as she recognized Sandy. "You thought it was--Molly?" she whispered, holding her hands clasped over the box in her lap. "So did I. Once I found her here--found her hunting under one rock after another. I gave her a lick on the back I reckon she has always remembered." The slow, sweet laugh rippled out--"Molly is mighty afraid of me." Then Sandy managed to command his thought and motions. He stepped to Cynthia and knelt beside her. "I am going away," he said softly. "Yes, I know. When?" "To-night." "To-night?" Fourteen and twelve have no perspective--everything is final and vital to them. The past has been but a witchery of preparation in a fairy tale of wonder and delight; the actual experience of action found them both unfitted for the ordeal, but in each boy and girl is the potential man and woman, and Sandy and Cynthia met the present moment characteristically. "I dreamed two dreams," said the girl with a shade of mysticism in her tones. "Once I saw you going down The Way, Sandy, with the look on your face that you now have. I stood by the big pine just where the trail ends in The Way, and watched you. Then I dreamed last night that I stood by the big pine again and you were coming up The Way a-waving to me like you knew I would be there. There was a look on your face--a new look--but I knew it, for I've seen it before in the Significant Room." Cynthia paused, for the question in Sandy's eyes held her. "You know my story?" she said with her delicious laugh thrilling her listener; "the story part of my life?" "Oh!" It came to Sandy then, in this strained, prosaic moment, the memory of Cynthia's fancy to set her little world in the frame of her "Pilgrim's Progress," the only book of fiction free to her. "Oh! yes, now I remember."