"You haven't got a towel--or," she said dubiously, looking at her small handkerchief, "anything to dry them on ?" But Low did not, as she perhaps expected, offer his own handkerchief.
"If you take a bath after our fashion," he said gravely, "you must learn to dry yourself after our fashion." Lifting her again lightly in his arms, he carried her a few steps to the sunny opening, and bade her bury her feet in the dried mosses and baked withered grasses that were bleaching in a hollow.

The young girl uttered a cry of childish delight, as the soft ciliated fibres touched her sensitive skin.
"It is healing, too," continued Low; "a moccasin filled with it after a day on the trail makes you all right again." But Miss Nellie seemed to be thinking of something else.
"Is that the way the squaws bathe and dry themselves ?" "I don't know; you forget I was a boy when I left them." "And you're sure you never knew any ?" "None." The young girl seemed to derive some satisfaction in moving her feet up and down for several minutes among the grasses in the hollow; then, after a pause, said, "You are quite certain I am the first woman that ever touched this spring ?" "Not only the first woman, but the first human being, except myself." "How nice!" They had taken each other's hands; seated side by side, they leaned against a curving elastic root that half supported, half encompassed, them.

The girl's capricious, fitful manner succumbed as before to the near contact of her companion.

Looking into her eyes, Low fell into a sweet, selfish lover's monologue, descriptive of his past and present feelings towards her, which she accepted with a heightened color, a slight exchange of sentiment, and a strange curiosity.

The sun had painted their half-embraced silhouettes against the slanting tree-trunk, and began to decline unnoticed; the ripple of the water mingling with their whispers came as one sound to the listening ear; even their eloquent silences were as deep, and, I wot, perhaps as dangerous, as the darkened pool that filled so noiselessly a dozen yards away.