dubiously, nevertheless. He had saved one dream, but—the future was long and the people like Ted were many and intrepid. Suddenly he saw what life might do to a being like Sheila and something of the fear and tenderness that Mrs. Caldwell had felt smote upon his heart.

CHAPTER II

It was on a Saturday of late October that it happened—the adventure which, in after years, Sheila was to see as so significant.

Sheila and Ted had gone to the woods with a nutting-party—a party too merry to do much but frolic, and eat as they gathered. By afternoon their baskets were not nearly full, and Ted surveyed his own with chagrin. He liked to accomplish what he set out to do, not because he was particularly industrious, but because a sense of power within him, partly sheer physical vigor and partly a naturally dominant will, demanded deeds for its satisfaction. If he could stay an hour longer, if he could go a little deeper into the woods, he could fill his basket, he reflected; whereas now—and he looked with contempt and a genuine distress at his meagre store of hazel nuts.

In his discontent he had already lagged behind his companions. The other children had set their faces homeward; Sheila walked just ahead of him, her arm around the waist of Charlotte Davis, a girl of her own age whom she had taken, with solemn vows, for her dearest friend. He might call the two girls, he thought, and together they could soon have a fine harvest, but his inclination rejected Charlotte almost as quickly as the idea occurred to him. For Charlotte, with her pert little freckled nose and her shrewd blue eyes, was not a comrade to Ted's taste. She had never shown him a proper reverence, and he was at the stage when a boy desires feminine tribute even while he affects to scorn it.

Charlotte had never understood him. Or was it what he did not suspect—that she had always understood him too well? At any rate she had a disconcerting way of gazing at him, her head cocked impudently on one side, her eyes half speculative, half amused. And her sharp, teasing tongue was even more disconcerting than her naughty, quizzical stare. He could imagine, from past experience at her hands, what would happen now if he included her in his plan.

"What do you want of more nuts?" she would ask, with the inquiring innocence that he had learned to distrust. "Haven't you got all you can eat?"

"Yes, but—" he would begin to explain.

And she would interrupt him in the middle of his sentence with:

"Oh, I see! You just want to do more than anybody else, don't you? Theodore Kent always does more than anybody else! Don't he, Sheila?" And this with a great show of admiration. Yet even to Sheila, whose loyal mind conceived with difficulty of any disrespect to him, the mockery of the apparent admiration would be obvious.

Yes, that was what would happen if he invited Charlotte to stay, and he felt himself flush at the fancied conversation. But he would ask Sheila. She really admired him! She appreciated him! If she was sometimes queer, she was a nice little thing in spite of that.

"Sheila!" he called.

She paused and looked back at him.

"Come here a minute," he urged. "I want to tell you something." And when she would have drawn Charlotte with her, he added: "It's a secret."

At which transparent hint, Charlotte flung off Sheila's arm and marched on, singing maliciously:

"Ted has got a secret—secret—secret!
Like a little gir-rul—gir-rul—gir-rul!"

And hearing himself thus effeminized, Ted winced and wondered if he had not better have asked her after all.

Sheila came up to him with a troubled face. The feud between him and Charlotte always hurt and bewildered her. "You've made Charlotte feel bad," she chided reproachfully.

But with Charlotte's taunt still ringing in his ears, Ted was ruthless: "Fiddlesticks! If she feels bad about that, she's silly. And I can't tell secrets to silly girls."

Sheila was sorry for Charlotte, but she began to feel vaguely flattered on her own account: "What's the secret?"

"I know a place—just a little way back yonder—that's fat with nuts!"

Sheila looked disappointed. It seemed, at this hour, rather a poor secret. But Ted, still with the air of honoring her above all others of her sex, went on: "I'm going back and get some. And"—this impressively—"I'm going to let you come with me!"

Sheila brightened at the magnanimous offer, but a moment later grew uneasy: "Grandmother would be scared if I didn't come home with the others."

"How'd she find it out? Your house is farthest. She won't see the rest of 'em."

"But—but when I tell her—" said Sheila uneasily.

"You needn't tell her! Don't you understand? She'll never know you didn't come home with the others!"

Ted had a scrupulous personal honor, a pride, as it were, in his integrity. He told the truth about his own transgressions and paid the piper without complaint. But for others his truth was sometimes equivocal, his morality comfortably lax. And these lapses from grace on his part always filled Sheila with a shocked dismay.

"Oh," she protested, "I couldn't do that! Why, it would be lying!"

"Fiddlesticks! Where's the lie? You wouldn't tell one!"

"It would be a lie," persisted Sheila. "It would be a lie if I let her think what wasn't so."

"Fiddlesticks!" he pronounced again. But he looked at her approvingly, nevertheless. Sheila was always "square," and he liked her the better for it. "Well, you go along with Charlotte, then," he added regretfully.

But he had tempted her more successfully than he knew, and her mind was busily working toward some compromise with her conscience. She cast an eye in the direction Charlotte had taken, and that glance decided her. "Charlotte's out of sight," she said. "I—I believe I'll stay, Ted—but I'll tell when I get home!"

It was late afternoon when they did at last start homeward—with baskets as full as Ted had predicted. Going through the bright-hued woods, where the scarlet and burnished yellow of long-lived leaves still flaunted ribbons of flame and the dead and dun-colored broke crisply beneath their feet, they fell amicably silent, trudging briskly along with the impetus of health and hunger. Ted's silence was the content of a body drenched all day in sunshine and clean, cold air, and now deliciously placid; but Sheila's quiet was of a different quality. For her the woods were full of mysteries and miracles; she was sure that little people, as quick and elusive as shadows, darted hither and thither at her very feet, and that enchantment was spread there like a fine-spun web. As she walked onward, brooding over things unseen and yet so surely true for her, there recurred to her a dream of the night before, and so vivid was her remembrance of it that she seemed to be dreaming a second time.

In the dream, oddly enough, she had been walking through these same woods. Here and there she had seen a bright leaf blowing; she had heard her own footsteps on the brittle leaves beneath; a slender shaft of sunlight—the last of the day—had stolen downward and touched her like a long finger. Then, suddenly, the golden finger had withdrawn and the dusk had fallen, not gradually, but in swift, downward billows of mist that flooded upon her and blinded her. She had closed her eyes against them for a moment, and when she opened them again, the mist had disappeared, leaving her in a space of clear gray light. Through this light some one had come toward her, a shape at first vague and ethereal, as if it were a lingering spirit of the mist, but gathering substance and definite outline as it advanced until it became the figure of a woman with arms that reached toward her for embrace. Involuntarily Sheila's own arms had reached forth in answer; she had taken a stumbling step forward; through the pale