his father, strolling out of the willows. “But wasn’t it a bit risky, considering the little girl yonder?”

“Father!” exclaimed the boy, very red. “I never even saw her. I’m ashamed.”

They stood looking across the pasture, where a little girl in a pink gingham dress lingered watching them, evidently lured by her curiosity from the old house at the crossroads just beyond.

Jim Neeland, still red with mortification, took the big cock-grouse from the dog which brought it—a tender-mouthed, beautifully trained Belton, who stood with his feathered offering in his jaws, very serious, very proud, awaiting praise from the Neelands, father and son. xxii

xxii

Neeland senior “drew” the bird and distributed the sacrifice impartially between both dogs—it being the custom of the country.

Neeland junior broke his gun, replaced the exploded shell, content indeed with his one hundred per cent performance.

“Better run over and speak to the little girl, Jim,” suggested old Dick Neeland, as he motioned the dogs into covert again.

So Jim ran lightly across the stony, clover-set ground to where the little girl roamed along the old snake fence, picking berries sometimes, sometimes watching the sportsmen out of shy, golden-grey eyes.

“Little girl,” he said, “I’m afraid the shot from my gun came rattling rather close to you that time. You’ll have to be careful. I’ve noticed you here before. It won’t do; you’ll have to keep out of range of those bushes, because when we’re inside we can’t see exactly where we’re firing.”

The child said nothing. She looked up at the boy, smiled shyly, then, with much composure, began her retreat, not neglecting any tempting blackberry on the way.

The sun hung low over the hazy Gayfield hills; the beeches and oaks of Mohawk County burned brown and crimson; silver birches supported their delicate canopies of burnt gold; and imperial white pines clothed hill and vale in a stately robe of green.

Jim Neeland forgot the child—or remembered her only to exercise caution in the Brookhollow covert.

The little girl Ruhannah, who had once fidgeted with prickly heat in her mother’s arms outside the walls of Trebizond, did not forget this easily smiling, 

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