“Roger—­you’re—­breaking me,” she cried, gasping for her breath in his arms, yet without giving up the clasp of her own arms about his neck in the least; and at that he sensed the brutality of his strength, and held her off a little, looking into her face.

Pride and happiness and the courage in his heart would have slunk away could he have seen himself then, as Father John saw him, coming from the edge of the bush, and as Nada saw him, held there at the end of his arms.  Since the day he had come with Peter to Cragg’s Ridge the blade of a razor had not touched his face, and his beard was like a brush, and with it his hair unkempt and straggling; and his eyes were red from sleeplessness and the haunting of that grim despair which had dogged his footsteps.

But these things Nada did not see.  Or, if she did, there must have been something beautiful about them for her.  For it was not a little girl, but a woman who was standing there before Jolly Roger now—­Nada grown older, very much older it seemed to McKay, and taller, with her hair no longer rioting free about her, but gathered up in a wonderful way on the crown of her head.  This change McKay discovered as she stood there, and it swept upon him all in a moment, and with it the prick of something swift and terrorizing inside him.  She was not the little girl of Cragg’s Ridge.  She was a woman.  In a year had come this miracle of change, and it frightened him, for such a creature as this that stood before him now Jed Hawkins would never have dared to curse or beat, and he—­Roger McKay—­was afraid to gather her back into his arms again.

And then, even as his fingers slowly drew themselves away from her shoulders, he saw that which had not changed—­the wonder-light in her eyes, the soul that lay as open to him now as on that other day in Indian Tom’s cabin, when Mrs. Captain Kidd had bustled and squeaked on the pantry shelf, and Peter had watched them as he lay with his broken leg in the going down of the sun.  And as he hesitated it was Nada herself who came into his arms, and laid her head on his breast, and trembled and laughed and cried there, while Father John came up and patted her shoulder, and smiled happily at McKay, and then went on to the cabin in the clearing.  For a time after that Jolly Roger crushed his face in Nada’s hair, and neither said a word, but there was a strange throbbing of their hearts together, and after a little Nada reached up a hand to his cheek, and stroked it tenderly, bristly beard and all.

“I’ll never let you run away from me again—­Mister—­Jolly Roger,” she said, and it was the little Nada of Cragg’s Ridge who whispered the words, half sobbing; but in the voice there was also something very definite and very sure, and McKay felt the glorious thrill of it as he raised his face from her hair, and saw once more the sun-filled world about him.

CHAPTER XVIII