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130 took it in his, and with his eyes admiringly fixed upon her face guided her down a bad bit. Again that curious thrill of contact of which Elsie was distinctly sensible. So also seemed Blake.

"Can't you understand," he said, in a voice unlike his usual deliberate utterance, "that there might be a risk to a man in touching the hand of a woman like you, if"

"If?" she asked.

"If he were fighting not so much against you as against himself?"

"Ah!" cried Elsie, triumphantly, quoting his own words. "Doesn't it seem a little like a confession of cowardice?"

"No," he said, looking up to her from his lower level and then taking her bodily in his arms and lifting her down a miniature precipice; "whatever I may be I am not a coward, and if you make me love you, Elsie—well, then we shall be quits. You shall love me too."

"And then?" she said almost below her breath, looking at him with fascinated eyes.

"Then," he said, with a light laugh, "the game will be a drawn one, the battle lost for the two of us. We shall go our ways both wounded, and perhaps—who knows—neither of us sorry, though we may have to bear the pain of the hunt till our lives' end."

She drew herself from him, throwing her body back against the rock. And at that moment there was a rustle in the dry leaves that choked a fissure almost at her elbow, and the gleam of something black and shining, which disappeared in the rank blady grass. Elsie gave a cry, and darted from the place, leaping past him on to a fallen log.

"What is it?" he said.

"Didn't you see a snake? Ina said this place was full of them, and I had forgotten. I am terrified of snakes. When I have a nightmare it is that I am bitten by a snake, and that I am somewhere out of reach of remedies. What should I have done if that thing had bitten me?" She shuddered.