Those were out and out the pleasantest days we ever spent in the Hollow—the best time almost Jim and I had had since we were boys. Nearly every day we rode out in the afternoon, and there wasn’t a hole or corner, a spring or a creek inside the walls of the old Hollow that we didn’t show Aileen. She was that sort of girl she took an interest in everything; she began to know all the horses and cattle as well as we did ourselves. Rainbow was regular given up to her, and the old horse after a bit knew her as well as his master. I never seen a decent horse that didn’t like to have a woman on his back; that is, if she was young and lissom and could ride a bit. They seem to know, in a sort of way. I’ve seen horses that were no chop for a man to ride, and that wouldn’t be particular about bucking you off if the least thing started them, but went as quiet as mice with a gir! on their backs,

So Aileen used to make Rainbow walk and amble his best, so that all the rest of us, when she did it for fun, had to jog. Then she’d jump him over logs or the little trickling deep creeks that ran down to the main water: or she’d pretend to have a race and go off full gallop, riding bins at his best for a quarter of a mile; then he’d pull up as easy as if he’d never gone out of a walk.

“How strange all this is,” she said one day; “I feel as if I were living on an island. It’s quite like playing at ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ only there’s no sea. We don’t seem to be able to get out all the same. It’s a happy, peaceful life, too. Why can’t we keep on for ever like this, and shut out the wicked, sorrowful world altogether?”

“Quite of your opinion, Miss Marston; why should we ever change?” says Starlight, who was sitting down with the rest of us by the side of our biggest river. We had been fishing all the afternoon and done well. “Let us go home no more; I am quite contented. But what about poor Jim? He looks sadder every day.”

“He is fretting for his wife, poor fellow, and I don’t wonder. You are one of those natures that never change, Jim; and if you don’t get away soon, or see some chance of rejoining her, you will die. How you are to do it I don’t know.”

“I am bound to make a try next month,” says Jim. “If I don’t do something towards it I shall go mad.”