she quickly amended. “I turned back at the second one.”

He failed of a ready answer, and an awkward silence was between them. Both were aware of this awkwardness, due to the known but unspoken things.

“Do you make a practice of dropping patterans?” Paula asked.

“The first I ever left,” he replied, with a shake of the head. “But there was such a generous supply of materials it seemed a pity, and, besides, the song was haunting me.”

“It was haunting me this morning when I woke up,” she said, this time her face straight ahead so that she might avoid a rope of wild grapevine that hung close to her side of the trail.