once.

"About your age."

She was delighted. "And will I surely see her?"

"Yes; of course."

"Do you suppose she'll like me?"

Layson, from what he knew of Barbara Holton, scarcely thought she would.
He could not make his fancy paint a picture of the haughty lowlands
beauty showing much consideration for this little mountain waif; but he
did not say so. He answered hesitatingly, and she noticed it.

"You don't think she'll like me!" she exclaimed.

"I didn't say so. Certainly she'll like you. Who could help it, Madge?"
He smiled. It did not seem to him, as his eyes studied her, that anybody
of sound sense could.

She sighed. "A woman could." She spoke with an instinctive wisdom which
her isolated life among the crags and peaks had not deprived her of. "A
woman always can. But, my, I hope she will!"

"She will," said Frank. "She will. And my dear Aunt--oh, you will love
her."

"Miss Aluth--Aluth--?" She stopped, questioningly, still bothered by the
name.

"Miss Alathea," he prompted. "She'll like you and you'll love her."

The girl smiled happily. "Uh-huh." Her acquiescence was immediate.
"Reckon maybe I'll love _her_, all right, and I _hope_ the other will
come true, too." Suddenly she was stricken with a fear. "But she won't,
though--dressed the way I be!"

"What you wear would make no difference to my Aunt Alathea," Frank
protested, "any more than it would make to Colonel Doolittle."

She did not speak again for quite a time, walking along the narrow
mountain-path with eyes fixed, but unseeing, on the trail. It was plain
that in her mind grave problems were being closely studied.

"Maybe," she said, at length, "I won't be so very _awful_ as you
_think_!"

They had reached the path which led first to the bridge across the
mountain-chasm making the rock on which her cabin stood an island, and
then, across this draw-bridge, to the cabin itself. She waved a gay and
unexpected good-bye to him.

He felt strangely robbed. He had expected another half-hour with her.
It astonished him to learn through this tiny disappointment how
agreeable the little mountain maid's society had come to be.

He was wakeful that night till a later hour than usual.

Somehow he was not as thoroughly delighted as he felt that he should be
by the prospect of his guests' arrival. His journey to the mountains and
his sojourn there had been considered rather foolish by his friends, but
he had wished to make quite sure that wh