The fat Bob sat down upon one of the outcropping ledges of the rock near where the sheep crowded about Marcella, at whom he looked with apprehensive eyes. Mrs. Bowles was the only woman in his very restricted social circle with whom he was acquainted, and his experience with her did not tend to foster confidence in the sex. “He looks at me ez ef he ’lowed I’d hurt him,” cried Marcella, flushing and suddenly affronted. “I never knowed I war so turr’ble ez all that.” “Bob—Bob, ye look the other way!” Jepson admonished him. But Bob, with scant regard, evidently, for Jepson’s mandates, continued to gaze wincingly up at the fair face of the girl, meeting her indignant and grieved eyes. Detecting at last a protest in her expression, he lifted his chubby arm and crooked it over his head, a forlornly inadequate guard against the blow he expected. “He thinks I’d hurt him!” she cried in a wounded manner. “Why, don’t ye know I wouldn’t fur nuthin’,—fur nuthin’?” She sat down by him on the rock and took his little sunburned hand in her soft clasp. His eyes were alight and alert with fear. With a wonderful show of elasticity he edged bouncingly along the ledge to evade her overtures; but a sheep had lain down across the rock, and although he pressed close into the wool of the creature, it did not rise, and he was at the mercy of his captor. She still held the gourd of salt, and the flock crowded about with insistent, rummaging nozzles. One of the sheep, standing on the higher ground behind her, looked pensively over her shoulder at the broad mountain landscape, the delicate, slender head of the animal almost touching the bright hair so heavily curling on her yellow sun-bonnet, still hanging loosely about her neck. The graceless Bob! Jepson could only lean his six feet of helplessness upon his long rifle, and earnestly breathe that sinking hope against hope known only to those who have callow relatives placed in a conspicuous and exacting position, with every opportunity for lamentable infringement of etiquette. Did ever so doubtful, suspicious, and terrified a look, as Bob cast upward, meet such suave, sweet, smiling eyes? Was ever a round, dodging, bullet head so evasively shifted from beneath so light a caress as the touch of those falling curling tresses? How wasted, how inopportunely wasted on Bob her soft words,— “I love ye—an’ I want ye ter love me!”