“All right.  Ye needn’t go to the pit, then, and I won’t come.”

“Flip!”

“And here’s Dad coming.  Quick!”

Lance chose to put his own interpretation on this last adjuration.  The resisting little hand was now lying quite limp on his shoulder.  He drew her brown, bright face near his own, felt her spiced breath on his lips, his cheeks, his hot eyelids, his swimming eyes, kissed her, hurriedly replaced his wig and blanket, and dropped beside the fire with the tremulous laugh of youth and innocent first passion.  Flip had withdrawn to the window, and was looking out upon the rocking pines.

“He don’t seem to be coming,” said Lance, with a half-shy laugh.

“No,” responded Flip demurely, pressing her hot oval cheek against the wet panes; “I reckon I was mistaken.  You’re sure,” she added, looking resolutely another way, but still trembling like a magnetic needle toward Lance, as he moved slightly before the fire, “you’re sure you’d like me to come to you?”

“Sure, Flip?”

“Hush!” said Flip, as this reassuring query of reproachful astonishment appeared about to be emphasized by a forward amatory dash of Lance’s; “hush! he’s coming this time, sure.”

It was, indeed, Fairley, exceedingly wet, exceedingly bedraggled, exceedingly sponged out as to color, and exceedingly profane.  It appeared that there was, indeed, a tree that had fallen in the “run,” but that, far from diverting the overflow into the pit, it had established “back water,” which had forced another outlet.  All this might have been detected at once by any human intellect not distracted by correspondence with strangers, and enfeebled by habitually scorning the intellect of its own progenitor.  This reckless selfishness had further only resulted in giving “rheumatics” to that progenitor, who now required the external administration of opodeldoc to his limbs, and the internal administration of whiskey.  Having thus spoken, Mr. Fairley, with great promptitude and infantine simplicity, at once bared two legs of entirely different colors and mutely waited for his daughter to rub them.  If Flip did this all unconsciously, and with the mechanical dexterity of previous habit, it was because she did not quite understand the savage eyes and impatient gestures of Lance in his encompassing wig and blanket, and because it helped her to voice her thought.

“Ye’ll never be able to take yer watch at the diamond pit to-night, Dad,” she said; “and I’ve been reck’nin’ you might set the squaw there instead.  I can show her what to do.”

But to Flip’s momentary discomfiture, her father promptly objected.  “Mebbe I’ve got suthin’ else for her to do.  Mebbe I may have my secrets, too—­eh?” he said, with dark significance, at the same time administering a significant nudge to Lance, which kept up the young man’s exasperation.  “No, she’ll rest yer a bit just now.  I’ll set her to watchin’ suthin’ else, like as not, when