Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/156

 and kissed it like a knight. It went tense at the touch of his lips. "Oh, Don!" she whispered, drooping. "Don!"—and in another voice, quickly: "Don! Someone will see us!"

He released her. They returned to the road and went on down the hill, side by side, in the staring sunlight, as silent, as nervous—and he as pale and as bewilderedly happy—as if they were a newly-married couple coming down the aisle of the church from the altar railing.

He made her comfortable under his pine, in a little nook of budded underbrush on the side of a hill overlooking the river; and he sat below her, turned so as to look up at her with the glowing face of a shy young passion. She had taken off her hat, and she leaned back against the tree, flushed and smiling and holding him with a deep gaze that twinkled and softened and beamed on him. They were rediscovering their past; it had become a new wonder to them, since it had led them to this. "Do you remember the little place we had in Coulton?—beside the stream?" she said. "Do you remember the day I found you there?—and you called me 'Miss Margaret'?"

"May I—again? You've always been 'Miss Margaret.

"Have I? Of course. Do you like it?"

"Yes." He fondled the name with his voice: "Miss Margaret!"

"What am I to call you?"

"I don't know. You called me 'Don.