It was June, and the hills, which would be bleakly forbidding barriers in winter, were now as blithely young as though they had never known the scourging of sleet or the blight of wind. The world was abloom, and the girl, too, was in her early June, and sentiently alive with the strength of its full pulse-tide. She was slim and lithely resilient of step. Her listening attitude was as eloquent of pausing elasticity as that of the gray squirrel. Her breathing was soft, though she had come down a steep mountainside, and as fragrant as the breath of the elder bushes that dashed the banks with white sprays of blossom. She brought with her to the greens and grays and browns of the woodland's heart a new note of color, for her calico dress was like the red cornucopias of the trumpet-flower, and her eyes were blue like little scraps of sky. Her heavy, brown-red hair fell down over her shoulders in loose profusion. The coarse dress was freshly briar-torn, and in many places patched; and it hung to the lithe curves of her body in a fashion which told that she wore little else. She had no hat, but the same spirit of childlike whimsey that caused her eyes to dance as she answered the partridge's call had led her to fashion for her own crowning a headgear of laurel leaves and wild roses. As she stood with the toes of one bare foot twisting in the gratefully cool moss, she laughed with the sheer exhilaration of life and youth, and started out on the table top of the huge rock. But there she halted suddenly with a startled exclamation, and drew instinctively back. What she saw might well have astonished her, for it was a thing she had never seen before and of which she had never heard. Now she paused in indecision between going forward toward exploration and retreating from new and unexplained phenomena. In her quick instinctive movements was something like the irresolution of the fawn whose nostrils have dilated to a sense of possible danger. Finally, reassured by the silence, she slipped across the broad face of the flat rock for a distance of twenty-five feet, and paused again to listen.