spray of clover blossoms with cheeks as red as they, but made no answer.     

       At that moment Colonel Buckstone himself came galloping along on his big black horse, shotgun in hand, with two hounds at his heels. He pulled up with a knowing look, shook his head, and then rode away with only a wave of his hand.     

       Florence and I rose and walked along in silence for a while, then she said:     

       “I'm sorry for you, and I will never tell what you have told me, never.”      

       “And I will never tell what you have told me,” I said.     

       “I'm willing you should tell him,” she answered. “He may as well know, even if he doesn't care.”      

       Temptation beset me even then, but in those first months my natural innocence was like a shield. By and by I began to feel the weight of it, and to lighten the load a little. That wonderful comedy which was being enacted in the life around me had begun to excite my interest when I went home to work in the fields for the summer.     

       I returned to school in the autumn, a big swarthy youth of seventeen. Before the end of that year the first of these many adventures of mine opened the gate of a better life before me.     

       It was a day in December. Henry and Florence Dunbar, Ralph Buckstone, and I were skating on the lake. The ice was new, and bent a little under our feet as we flew, out on the glassy plain in pursuit of Florence, more daring and expert than the rest of us. The day was cloudless, and the smooth lake roof shone in the sunlight. An hour later we were returning, with Florence a hundred or more feet ahead of us, when I heard the snap of the breaking ice and saw her go down like a stone falling through a skylight. I skated straight for the break, and, taking a deep breath, crashed among the broken slabs of ice and down into cold, roaring water. My hand touched something, and I seized it—her coat, as I knew by the feeling. Then came that little fraction of a minute in which one must do the right thing and do it quickly. I could see, of course, and could hear the shouts of the boys, the click of skates passing near, and the stir of the shattered ice. That saved us, that sound of the wavering ice. I made for it, got my hand through, and caught a shinny 

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