He held up his hand, and studied the scar. The bared forearm, under the uprolled sleeve, was as brown and steady as a sculptor's work in bronze. Suddenly, he heard a laugh at his back, a tuneful laugh like a trill struck from a xylophone, and came to his feet with a realization of a blue gingham dress, a girlish figure, a sunbonnet and a huge cluster of dogwood blossoms. The sunbonnet and dogwood branches seemed conspiring to hide all the face except the violet eyes that looked out from them. Near by stood a fox terrier, silently and alertly regarding him, its head cocked jauntily to the side. But, even before she had lowered the dogwood blossoms enough to reveal her face, the lancelike uprightness of her carriage brought recognition and astonishment. "Do you mind my staring at you?" she demanded, innocently. "Isn't turn-about fair play?" "But, Miss Filson," he stammered, "I--I thought you lived in town!" "Then, George didn't tell you that we were to be the closest sort of neighbors?" The merriment of her laugh was spontaneous. She did not confide to Saxon just why Steele's silence struck her as highly humorous. She knew, however, that the place had originally recommended itself to its purchaser by reason of just that exact circumstance--its proximity. The man took a hasty step forward, and spoke with the brusqueness of a cross-examiner: "No. Why didn't he tell me? He should have told me! He--" He halted abruptly, conscious that his manner was one of resentment for being led, unwarned, into displeasing surroundings, which was not at all what he meant. Then, as the radiant smile on the girl's face--the smile such as a very little girl might have worn in the delight of perpetrating an innocent surprise--suddenly faded into a pained wonderment, he realized the depth of his crudeness. Of course, she could not know that he had come there to run away, to seek asylum. She could not guess, that, in the isolation of such a life as his uncertainty entailed, associates like herself were the most hazardous; that, because she seemed to him altogether wonderful, he distrusted his power to quarantine his heart against her artless magnetism. As he stood abashed at his own crassness, he wanted to tell her that he developed these crude strains only when he was thrown into touch with so fine grained a nature as her own; that it was the very sense of his own pariah-like circumstance. Then, before she had time to speak, came a swift artistic leaping at his heart. He should have known that she would be here! It was her rightful environment! She belonged as inherently under blossoming dogwood branches as the stars belong beyond the taint of earth-smoke. She was a dryad, and these were her woods. After all, how could it matter? He had run away bravely. Now, she was here also, and the burden of responsibility might rest on the woodsprites or the gods or his horoscope or wherever it belonged. As for himself, he would enjoy the present.