She jumped to her feet. Her eyes went questing, questing, everywhere. To be free again; to be her own self, Lynette, untrammelled.... And she felt awondering illogically: "Can it be that, after all, he was driving himself beyond any man's endurance? that he is more badly hurt than either he or I knew?" But he returned a full half-hour before even the most eager could name it noon. True to his word, he sent his voice, like a glorious herald, ahead of him. She heard him call, not the wolf cry, but a rollicking shout. And ten minutes later he himself came, plainly in the highest of good humors. He was still pale and looked haggard, but his eyes were flashing and triumphant and untroubled. He came to her, splashing across the creek, water flying about his boot-tops. "I've had a bath," he announced from afar. "And I've plastered myself with the worst that Billy Winch can concoct, and Richard is himself again!" He came closer, towered above her and said: "You, too, have bathed! You look it, as fresh from the plunge as any Diana! It's good to be _clean_, isn't it?" She flushed and was ashamed for it. She bit her lip and made no answer. "Come," he said. "We'll lunch. And now, and from now on for some sixty years, my girl, it will be I who waits on you! The slave rôle reversed!" and he laughed. "I promised to wait for you; I make no more promises!" "That's fair enough! I watch you then!" "Do you want to make me hate you?" "Rather, I want you to come to love me." "Could any girl come to love a man who treats her as you have done me?" "Could any girl come to love a man," he demanded earnestly, "who thought so little of her as to let her escape him when once destiny had brought her and him together?" CHAPTER XXI The most perfect of the summer months in this secluded mountain nook, not inaptly named "Eden" by Standing, was a period of time measuring itself in soft, fragrant loveliness. The days were balmy, perfect, halcyon; gentle hours of blue cloudlessness and golden sunshine and little breezes which scarcely ruffled the clear water in the bigger pools; night as clear as crystal, with flaring stars like distant torches above the yellow pine tops; nature in her gentlest mood here among the ruggedness of the wilderness, expressing herself in the most delightful of odors wafted through the woods, in the tenderest tiniest blossoms of wild flowers; a time of infinite hush and infinite solitude and peace.