"I think a fire would be pleasant," she remarked, "though it is really as warm as summer."
She had changed the picture only to improve it, for the suggestion of wildness and freedom in her dark hair fitted more perfectly with the spirit of the twilight woods. It may be that only a man can understand the fascination that exists for men in just such a simple operation as she had performed. The absolute femininity of it, the fumbling for the hatpins, the deliberate and thoughtful reinserting of them afterward in the discarded hat, where they can be found when needed, the invariable smoothing back of the hair from brow and eyes,--all these things make their peculiar appeal. It was this that caused Leigh to smile as he turned away and went in search of fuel, whistling softly to himself. Returning with his hat well filled with pine cones, he caught sight of her face before she noted his approach, and was struck, as once before, by her expression of immeasurable sadness. She sat, as at first, embracing her knees with her hands, her nether lip drawn in as if she would suppress a sigh, her eyes fixed upon the distance and shadowed by something of the solemnity of the coming night.
As the light flames shot suddenly up from the heap of cones, their brilliancy made the surrounding woods seem vast and dark, the more so as the sun had now sunk behind the hill across the stream, filling the woods in that quarter with a glow as from another fire. He fed the flames thoughtfully with bits of broken branches, talking somewhat at random about a camping trip in the Yosemite.
"Isn't it absurd," she said presently, "that we have gradually lowered our voices till we are talking almost in whispers?"
"I mean to break the spell at once," he declared, and having made a trumpet with his hand, he hallooed loudly toward the west. The result was unexpected. A ghostly triple echo, which the lower tone of their earlier conversation had failed to elicit, answered him from the opposite shore. In broad daylight an echo will suggest mystery and a bodiless, impish mocker, even to an unimaginative mind, but now the effect was intensified tenfold by the silence and darkness that enclosed them like a wall.
"You may laugh," she said, "but I don't wonder that primitive peoples imagined a haunted nature. I 'm an absolute Pagan this very moment. I believe in Pan and Echo and all the rest of them, and I don't like their company a bit."