Burned Bridges

Afterward Thompson could never quite determine what prompted him to

follow Sophie Carr when he saw her go down toward the creek bank. He was

on his way to Carr's house, driven thither by pure pressure of

loneliness, born of three days' solitary communion within the limits of

his own shack. He wanted to hear a human voice again. And it was a

vagrant, unaccountable impulse that sent him after Sophie instead of

directing him straight to Carr's living room, where her father would

probably be sitting, pipe in mouth, book in hand.

He hurried with long strides after Sophie. She dipped below the sloping

bank before he came up, and when he came noiselessly down to the grassy

bank she stood leaning against a tree, gazing at the sluggish flow of

Lone Moose.

He had seen her in moods that varied from feminine pettishness to the

teasingly mischievous. But he had never seen her in quite the same pitch

of spirits that caught his attention as soon as he reached her side.

There was something bubbling within her, some repressed excitement that

kindled a glow in her gray eyes, kept a curiously happy smile playing

about her lips.

And that magnetic something that drew the heart out of Thompson,

afflicting him with a maddening surge of impulses, had never functioned

so strongly.

"What is it?" he asked abruptly. "You seem--you look--"

He stopped short. It was not what he meant to say. He tried to avoid the

intimately personal when he was with her. He knew the danger of those

sweet familiarities--to himself. But he had blurted out the question

before he was aware. He was standing so close to her that a little

whirling breeze blew a strand of her yellow hair across his face. That

tenuous contact made him quiver, gave him a queer intoxicating thrill.

"Does it show so plainly as that?" she smiled. "It's a secret. A really

wonderful secret. I'm just bursting to talk about it, but I mustn't.

Talking might break the spell. Do you--along with your other naïve

beliefs--believe in spells, Mr. Thompson?"

"Yes," he answered simply. "In yours."

Her eyes danced. She laughed softly, deep in her throat, like a meadow

lark in spring.

"That's the first time I ever knew you to indulge in irony," she said.

"It isn't irony," he answered moodily. "It's the honest truth."

"Poor man," she said gaily. "I'd be flattered to death to think a simple

backwoods maiden could make such a profound impression on a young man

from the city--but it isn't so."

She turned her head sidewise, like a saucy bird, regarding him with mock

gravity, a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. Mr. Thompson had a long arm

and he stood close to her, tantalizingly close. She was smiling. Her

lips parted redly over white, even teeth, and as Thompson bent that

moody somber gaze on her, her breath seemed to come suddenly a little

faster, making her round breast flutter--and a faint tinge of pink stole

up to color the soft whiteness of her neck, up into the smooth round of

her cheeks.