“You didn't get to know her, dad, did ye?” queried Zuleika.
“No,” responded Hays gravely, “except to see she wasn't no backwoods or mountaineering sort. Now, there's the kind of woman, Zuly, as knows her own mind and yours too; that a man like your brother Jack oughter pick out when he marries.”
Zuleika's face beamed behind her father. “You ain't goin' to sit up any longer, dad?” she said, as she noticed him resume his seat by the fire. “It's gettin' late, and you look mighty tuckered out with your night's work.”
“Do you know what she said, Zuly?” returned her father, after a pause, which turned out to have been a long, silent laugh.
“No.”
“She said,” he repeated slowly, “that she reckoned I came back here to-night to have the pleasure of her acquaintance!” He brought his two hands heavily down upon his knees, rubbing them down deliberately towards his ankles, and leaning forward with his face to the fire and a long-sustained smile of complete though tardy appreciation.
He was still in this attitude when Zuleika left him. The wind crooned over him confidentially, but he still sat there, given up apparently to some posthumous enjoyment of his visitor's departing witticism.
It was scarcely daylight when Zuleika, while dressing, heard a quick tapping upon her shutter. She opened it to the scared and bewildered face of her brother.
“What happened with her and father last night?” he said hoarsely.
“Nothing—why?”