when Eve found a sinuous stranger lurking there in gay disguise, and was
beguiled into tasting the tempting fruit he offered her. It might be an
interesting inquiry to collect even the most notable instances of those
who, wandering all innocent and joyous amid the bowers, have found the
honey of poisonous flowers where they meant only innocence. But the
reader will, perhaps, recall enough instances in a private and
unrecorded history to fill the need of illustration. It suffices, then,
to say that, each afternoon that Gordon Keith wandered with Alice Yorke
through the leafy woods, he was straying farther in that perilous path
where the sunlight always sifts down just ahead, but the end is veiled
in mist, and where sometimes darkness falls.

These strolls had all the charm for him of discovery, for he was always
finding in her some new trait, and every one was, he thought, an added
charm, even to her unexpected alternations of ignorance and knowledge,
her little feminine outbreaks of caprice. One afternoon they had
strolled farther than usual, as far even as the high pines beyond which
was the great rock looking to the northeastward. There she had asked him
to help her up to the top of the rock, but he had refused. He told her
that she had walked already too far, and he would not permit her
to climb it.

"Not permit me! Well, I like that!" she said, with a flash of her blue
eyes; and springing from her seat on the brown carpet, before he could
interpose, she was climbing up the high rock as nimbly as if she were
a boy.

He called to her to stop, but she took no heed. He began to entreat her,
but she made no answer. He was in terror lest she might fall, and
sprang after her to catch her; but up, up she climbed, with as steady a