girls.

"Bah! he is a nickum--a mysterious imp," snapped Pemrose, the fire that
smoldered behind her white face leaping up. "Can't be shyness with him;
he doesn't look the least bit shy! Oh-h! what a fool I was to give him a
chance to help me--save me--in a 'pinch', again."

Tears were springing to her eyes now,--tears of reaction.

She felt that an eighteen-year-old youth, privileged to save her life
twice--it seemed a privilege at the moment--might, at least, have had
the manners to let her thank him for it.

"Oh! he's the nicest and the--hor-rid-est--boy I ever saw," wailed Una,
in tribute to the train-wreck, still a nightmare on her mind.

Both girls were dumfounded, as well they might be.

Pemrose, with her blue eyes under jet-black lashes--girdled, moreover,
with her father's growing fame--Una, with lighter eyelashes and hair,
and that little fixed star of angry excitement blazing in one sweet dark
eye, they were the kind of girls whose good graces a boy would be the
last to spurn, fair even for daughters of Columbia who, democratic in
beauty, as in all else, never hatches out an ugly duckling.

They gazed in stormy bewilderment now after Jack at a Pinch walking off
with his party whom, indeed, he had herded away.

Andrew was looking gloweringly after him, too.

"An' so he's the loon that sat in the Chair first!" grumbled the still
angry chauffeur. "Aw weel--" the "dour" expression upon the speaker's
long upper lip softening a little--"weel! he may be ill-trickit, but
he's a swanky lad, for a' that. Aye, fegs! an' braw, too."

"Oh! he's 'swanky' enough--swaggering--but I don't think he's 'braw',
handsome--not with that little stand in his eye--just like Una's, only
more so." Pem added the last words under her breath. "But, oh! for
goodness sake! let's get away from here," she cried wildly; "over to the
other side of the Pinnacle, anywhere--anywhere--so that we won't see him
again, before his strutting over what he's done, makes me--makes me--"

"Yes--it's pretty on the other side of the hill, easy climbing, much
smoother--green and spring-like," assented Una soothingly, pouring balm.
"It's all covered with young pine trees and just a few, very few, tall
silvery birches. Not rough and rocky as it is this side!" glancing
shiveringly down the precipice.

"Not another Deev's Chair in sight, I'll be hoping--fegs!" muttered
Andrew, picking up a basket which he had carried from the automobile up
the low mou