By and by one of the Arnalls whispered to Mattie Shannon,—"He's sidled off with her, at last. Did you ever know such a fellow for a new face? But it's partly the petticoat. He's such an artist's eye for color. He was raving about her all the while she stood hanging those shawls among the pines to keep the wind from Mrs. Linceford. She isn't downright pretty either. But she's got up exquisitely!"
Leslie Goldthwaite, in her lovely mountain dress, her bright bloom from enjoyment and exercise, with the stray light through the pines burnishing the bronze of her hair, had innocently made a second picture, it would seem. One such effects deeper impression, sometimes, than the confusing splendor of incessant changes.
"Are you looking for something? Can I help you?" Frank Scherman had said, coming up to her, as she and her friend Dakie, a little apart from the others, were poising among some loose pebbles.
"Nothing that I have lost," Leslie answered, smiling. "Something I have a very presumptuous wish to find. A splendid garnet geode, if you please!"
"That's not at all impossible," returned the young man. "We'll have it before we go down,—see if we don't!"
Frank Scherman knew a good deal about Feather-Cap, and something of geologizing. So he and Leslie—Dakie Thayne, in his unswerving devotion, still accompanying—"sidled off" together, took a long turn round under the crest, talking very pleasantly—and restfully, after Sin Saxon's continuous brilliancy—all the way. How they searched among loose drift under the cliff, how Mr. Scherman improvised a hammer from a slice of rock; and how, after many imperfect specimens, they did at last "find a-purpose" an irregular oval of dull, dusky stone, which burst with a stroke into two chalices of incrusted crimson crystals,—I ought to be too near the end of a long chapter to tell. But this search and this finding, and the motive of it, were the soul and the crown of Leslie's pleasure for the day. She did not even stop to think how long she had had Frank Scherman's attention all to herself, or the triumph that it was in the eyes of the older girls, among whom he was excessively admired, and not very disguisedly competed for. She did not know how fast she was growing to be a sort of admiration herself among them, in their girls' fashion, or what she might do, if she chose, in the way of small, early belleship here at Outledge with such beginning,—how she was "getting on," in short, as girls express it. And so, as Jeannie Hadden asked, "Where was the satisfaction?"
"You never knew anything like it," said Jeannie to her friend Ginevra, talking it all over with her that evening in a bit of a visit to Mrs. Thoresby's room. "I never saw anybody take so among strangers. Madam Routh was delighted with her; and so, I should think, was Mr. Scherman. They say he hates trouble; but he took her all round the top of the mountain, hammering stones for her to find a geode."
"That's the newest dodge," said Mrs. Thoresby, with a little sarcastic laugh. "Girls of that sort are always looking for geodes." After this, Mrs. Thoresby had always a little well-bred venom for Leslie Goldthwaite.
At the same time Leslie herself, coming out on the piazza for a moment after tea, met Miss Craydocke approaching over the lawn. She had only her errand to introduce her, but she would not lose the opportunity. She went straight up to the little woman, in a frank, sweet way. But a bit of embarrassment underneath, the real respect that made her timid,—perhaps a little nervous fatigue after the excitement and exertion of the day,—did what nerves and embarrassment, and reverence itself will do sometimes,—played a trick with her perfectly clear thought on its way to her tongue.
"Miss Graywacke, I believe?" she said, and instantly knew the dreadful thing that she had done.