she straightened her brave little shoulders again to her labour, she was arrested by a strange sound as of the ripping of bark. It was an ominous kind of noise in the lonely stillness, and apprehensively she peered in the direction whence it came. Then she grew afraid. On the other shore, about a couple of rods back from the water, she saw a large black bear sitting upon its haunches beside a fallen and rotten tree. As she stared, wide-eyed and trembling, he lifted his great paw and laid hold of the dead bark. Again came the ripping, tearing noise, and off peeled a huge brown slab. To the exposed surface he applied a nimble tongue – and Barbara's terror subsided. She saw that he was quite too absorbed in the delights of an ant-log to pay any attention to a mere girl; and she remembered, too, that the black bear was a rather inoffensive soul so long as he was not treated contumeliously. For all this, however, she made as much haste from the spot as was consistent with a noiseless paddle – and kept furtive watch over her shoulder until she had put a good half-mile between the canoe and the ant-log.
By the time her concern about the bear had begun to flag she found that the current was quickening its pace. The trees slipped by more swiftly, and the shores grew bolder. A mellow, roaring clamour came to her ears, and with delicious trepidation she remembered a little rapid through which she must pass. Around a turn of the stream it came into view, its small waves sparkling where the forest gave back and admitted the afternoon sun. Her experience in running rapids had been slight, but she remembered the course which Uncle Bob had taken, between two large rocks where the water ran deep and smooth; and she called to mind, the further to brace her confidence, that Uncle Bob had stigmatised this particular rapid as mere child's play. Her heart beat rather wildly as she entered the broken water, and the currents gripped her, and the banks began to flee upward past her view. But her eye held true and her wrist firm. The clamour filled her ears, but she laid her course with precision and fetched the very centre of the channel between the big rocks. From that point all was clear. The canoe went racing through the last ripple, which splashed her lightly as she passed; and in a reach of quiet water, foam-flecked and shining, she drew a deep breath of triumph. This, indeed, was to live. Never had she experienced a keener consciousness of power. She felt her enterprise already successful. The ancient woods, with their bears, their porcupines, their wide-winged brown owls, lay behind her. Second Westings was incalculably far away. There in plain view, rising over its comfortable orchard trees, not half a mile distant, were the roofs and chimneys of Gault House, overlooking, as she had heard, the waters of the great river. And beyond the next turn, as she thought with a thrill, she would see the great river itself.
CHAPTER VIII
Barbara rounded the next turn. There before her, widely gleaming, spread the waters of the great river itself. She cried out in her joy, and paddled madly – then paused, abashed, perceiving that she was the object of a critical but frankly admiring scrutiny. Her attention was diverted from the great river. Here was a tall boy – of her own caste unmistakably – poling himself out on a precarious little raft to meet her. Her flush of confusion passed as quickly as it had come, and laying her paddle across the gunwale, she waited with interest to discover what he might have to say.
Barbara had met but few boys of her own class, and those few had seemed, under her merciless analysis, uniformly uninteresting. Their salient characteristics, to her mind, were freckles, rudeness, ignorance, and a disposition to tease cats. But this youth was obviously different. Apparently about seventeen years of age, he was tall and graceful, and the way the clumsy log-raft on which he stood surged forward under the thrusts of his pole revealed his strength. Barbara loved strength, so long as delicacy saved it from coarseness. The boy was in his shirt sleeves, which were of spotless cambric, and Barbara noted, with approbation, the ample ruffles turned back, for convenience, from his sinewy brown hands. She observed that his brown, long-fronted, flowered vest was of silk, and his lighter brown small-clothes of a fine cloth worn only by the gentry; that his stockings were of black silk, and his shoes, drenched most of the time in the water that lapped over the raft, were adorned with large buckles of silver. She admired the formal fashion in which his black hair was tied back in a small and very precise queue. But most of all she liked his face, which was even darker than her own – lean, somewhat square in the jaw, with a broad forehead, and gray-blue, thoughtful eyes, set wide apart.
Now, Barbara's fearless scorn of conventions was equalled only by her ignorance of them. This boy pleased her, so why should she hesitate to show it? When the raft ranged up alongside the canoe, she laid hold upon it for anchorage and the greater convenience in conversation, and flashed upon the stranger the full dazzle of her scarlet lips, white teeth, and bewildering radiance of green eyes. The boy straightened himself from the pole in order to bow with the more ceremony – which he accomplished to Barbara's complete satisfaction in spite of the unsteadiness of the raft.
"What a nice-looking boy you are!" she said, frankly condescending. "What is your name?"
"Robert Gault, your very humble servant!" he replied, bowing again, and smiling. The smile was altogether to Barbara's fancy, and showed even, strong, white teeth, another most uncommon merit in a boy. "And I am sure," he went on, "that this is Mistress Barbara Ladd whom I have the honour to address."
"Why, how do you know me?" exclaimed Barbara, highly pleased. Then, quickly apprehensive, she added, "What makes you think I am Barbara Ladd?"
The boy noted the change in her countenance, and wondered at it. But he replied at once:
"Of course the name of Mistress Barbara Ladd, and her daring, and her canoe-craft, and her beauty" (this he added out of his own instant conviction), "have spread far down the river. When I came up here the other day to visit my grandmother" (he indicated slightly the distant roofs of Gault House), "I came with a great hope of being permitted to meet you!"
Evidently he knew nothing of her flight. Her uneasiness vanished. But she had never had a compliment before – a personal compliment, such as is dear to every wise feminine heart – and that word "beauty" was most melodious to her ears. As a matter of fact, she did not herself admire her own appearance at all, and even had an aversion to the mirror – but it occurred to her now, for the first time, that this was a point upon which it was not needful that every one should agree with her. It was practically her first real lesson in tolerance toward an opinion that differed from her own.
"I'll warrant you heard no good of that same Barbara Ladd, more's the pity!" she answered, coquettishly tossing her dark little head and shooting at him a distracting sidelong glance from narrowed lids. "Anyhow, if you are Lady Gault's grandson, I am most happy to meet you."
She stretched out to him her brown little hand, just now none too immaculate, indeed, but with breeding stamped on every slim line of it, and eloquent from the polished, well-trimmed, long, oval nails. Instantly, careless of the water and his fine cloth breeches, Robert went down upon one knee and gallantly kissed the proffered hand.
Barbara was just at an age when, for girls with Southern blood in their veins, womanhood and childhood lie so close entwined in their personalities that it is impossible to disentangle the golden and the silver threads. Never before had any one kissed her hand. She was surprised at the pleasant thrill it gave her; and she was surprised, too, at her sudden, inexplicable impulse to draw the hand away. It was a silly impulse, she told herself; so she controlled it, and accepted the kiss with the composure of a damsel well used to such ceremonious homage. But she did not like such a nice boy to be kneeling in the water.
"Why did you come out on that rickety thing?" she asked. "Why haven't you a boat or a canoe?"
"This was the only thing within reach," he explained, respectfully relinquishing her hand. "I saw you coming; and I knew it must be you, because no other girl could handle a canoe so beautifully; and I was afraid of losing you if I waited."
"That was civil of you. But aren't you getting very wet there? Won't you come into the canoe?"
"Really?" he exclaimed, lifting
