"Her name is Winifred," he announced.
"I believe I never saw a really little baby before," said Danvers, looking with awe at the tiny sleeper. "My sister and I were near of an age; we grew up together. How little babies are!"
Miss Blair laughed. "Winifred is a very nice baby—big for her few months of life. I'm very proud to be her godmother." Danvers watched as she pulled the fleecy covering around the sleeping child. With the act a maternal look came into her lovely face, unconscious as she was of scrutiny, and a thrill of manhood shook him deeply.
"So you did not care for the party?" inquired the caller, presently. "I thought all ladies adored card parties and enjoyed fighting for the prizes."
"Play cards when the mountains look like that?" Winifred rejoined. "It would be a sacrilege!"
"I do not care for cards myself," agreed Danvers.
"Wouldn't you like to be out there?" Winifred seemed scarcely to have heard him.
Following the direction of her gaze, he thought her wide-flung gesture a deserved tribute to the view. The Prickly Pear Valley lay before them, checkered in vivid green or sage-drab as water had been given or withheld. The Scratch Gravel Hills jutted impertinently into the middle distance; while on the far western side of the plain the Jefferson Range rose, tier on tier, the distances shading the climbing foothills, until the Bear's Tooth, a prominent, jagged peak, cleft the azure sky. A stretch of darker blue showed where the Missouri River, itself unseen, broke through the Gate of the Mountains. The view took one away from the affairs of men. On their side of the valley towered Mount Helena and Mount Ascension with auriferous gulches separating and leading up to the main range of the Rockies. As the foothills sank into the valley the gulches, washed of their golden treasure, were transformed into the streets of Helena—irregular, uneven, unpaved often; in the residence part of the town young trees ambitiously spread their slender branches; the main street and intersecting steeper ones were bordered with business blocks as ambitious, in their way, as the transplanted trees.
"'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,'" quoted Winifred, softly. "What a singer David was. But these mountains seem worthy of the grand old psalms."
"Yes," assented Danvers, simply; and he liked her better on this second meeting than he had at the dinner party—a crucial test where a woman is concerned.