Page:Son of the wind.djvu/95

RV 83 danced for me. I've never forgotten it. I don't often see things like that."

"I'm sure I don't," said Carron. What he was thinking of, however, was the great room, and the large-eyed child, spellbound in the moonlight, with the gyrations of a toe-dancer.

"I think you must have seen a great deal," she answered. "Look, there are the old gate-posts. They ought to have been pulled down long ago, but I am afraid I should miss them. The spring path turns off just here."

He would hardly have known it was a path. To one driving by it would look like a natural opening in the forest. She had to lead him now, the way was so narrow. It showed indications of having been wider once in the short green growth of pine on either side. Some little distance on he saw the fragment of a board hanging gray and rain-worn from a post; farther yet the thin iron legs of a chair—such a chair as one sees around café tables—thrust out of the drift of pine-needles. Between these relics the lithe body of the girl swung at a quick-footing pace, here stooping her head, there lifting a branch aside, now glancing over her shoulder at him. Then, a little in front of him, he saw two hand-rails, tottering, all but collapsing, yet somehow clinging together, and opening out, embracing a sort of in-