toward him.  But self-respect required him to stand firm as long as possible, although he felt the strength going out of his rifle arm under her clinging touch.  She felt it going, too, and began to smile through her tears.  And then, sure of her victory, she threw caution to the winds—­as older and wiser women have done too openly in vanquishing stronger and more masterful men.  She let him see that she knew she had conquered, which is always a fatal mistake on the part of a woman toward a man.  Smiling and dimpling, she put up her hand and patted his cheek—­precisely as if he had been a child.

The boy shrunk as if the caress had been a touch of fire.  He broke away and strode off up the hillside with his longest, manliest stride.  This humiliation was past bearing or forgiving.  He could have forgiven being called a dreamer—­a useless drone—­among the men of clear heads and strong hands who had already wrested a great state from the wilderness, and who, through this conquest, were destined to become the immortal founders of the Empire of the West.  He could have overlooked being spoken to like a child by a girl who might be younger than himself for all he or she knew to the contrary—­though this would have been harder.  He might even have forgiven that pat on his cheek which was downy with beard, had he been either younger or older.  But as it was—­well, the matter may safely be left to the sympathy of the man who remembers the most sensitive time of his own youth; that trying period when he feels himself to be no longer a boy and nobody else considers him a man.

David did not know where he was going or what he meant to do.  He was blindly striding up the river bank away from Ruth, fairly aflame with the determination to do something—­anything—­to prove his manhood.  For nothing ever makes a boy resolve quite so suddenly and firmly to become a man instantly as to be treated by a girl as he had been by Ruth.  Had the most desperate danger then come in David’s way, he would have hailed and hazarded it with delight.  But he could not think of anything to overwhelm her with just at that moment, and so he could only stride on in helpless, angry silence.  Ruth flew after him as if her thin white skirts had been strong, swift wings.  She overtook him before he had gone very far, and clung to him again more than ever like some beautiful white spirit of the woods wreathed in mist, with her soft blown garments and her softer blown hair.  She merely wound herself around him at first, breathless and panting.  But as soon as she caught her breath the coaxing, the laughing, and the crying came all together.  David kept from looking down as long as he could, but his pace slackened and his arm again relaxed.  Finally—­taken off guard—­he glanced at the face so near his breast.  The dusk could not dim its beauty and only made it more lovely.  No more resistance was possible for him—­or for any man or boy—­who saw Ruth as she looked then.  David’s big rough hand was now surrendered meekly enough to the quick clasp of her little fingers, and—­forgetting all the daring deeds that he meant to do—­he was led like any lamb up the hill to the open door of Cedar House.