He skirted the house. If he had destination or purpose Rod was not conscious of either as a definite urge. He was simply strolling. But as he turned the corner he came upon a girl leaning on a parasol and staring at some letters cut in a massive cornerstone where the thick foundation rose out of the earth.
"Oh, Rod," she said. "Do answer about a million questions for me, please."
"Have you got a list?" he asked.
"A list? Oh, no," she chuckled. "I'm still on an even keel."
"Nautically all right," Rod smiled.
He didn't know Laska Wall very well. He hadn't seen much of her. She had only been at Hawk's Nest three days. Prior to that he had heard more or less about the Walls. They were people who had lately begun to cut quite a figure in Vancouver society. His brothers knew them. Both Phil and Grove had pretty well monopolized Laska since her arrival here. But what Rod had seen of her he liked. She was a quiet girl, with a slow smile that wonderfully transformed a piquant, delicately tinted face. Rod looked at her now admiringly. He wondered if Isabel, the pretty, bisque-doll creature whose dainty clothes Mary Thorn had remarked, would be like that when she was twenty-one. He supposed so, since they were sisters, but he could scarcely believe it. He detested Isabel. She giggled incessantly, flaunted herself before him with an irritating archness, annoyed him with her glib French, with numerous manifestations of what Rod contemptuously termed (to himself) "kindergarten stuff." He was a man,—in his own estimation. It was a trial, which he bore as a gentleman, to be expected to act as Isabel's cavalier, merely because they were the juveniles of this house party. Isabel was juvenile enough, Rod admitted. He exempted himself from the charge of extreme youth. But it was provoking to have every one else blandly proceed on that assumption.
Perhaps that was why he warmed to this fair-haired young woman who addressed him as an intellectual equal who could impart knowledge.
"What does that signify, Rod?" she asked, pointing to a group of letters and figures graven deep in the stone.
"Oh, that's the cornerstone of the first course of masonry above ground, of the first wing of the old house, built by the first Norquay," Rod told her with a trace of pride that he covered by assumed casualness. "Those are his initials. R.S.N. for Roderick Sylvester Norquay. And the year."
"1809," the girl murmured. "A hundred years exactly. You know I have always thought of this country as a semi-wilderness—the last American frontier. How many generations, Rod?"