"Once upon a time," he began with a low laugh, "there lived a singularly sickening little prig of a kid, pampered and spoiled to his selfish marrow. Though I hate to roast a small boy, I am bound to say that this one was pretty nearly a total loss—and he was I. He threatened to grow into a more odious man, but Providence intervened in his behalf—with disguised kindness. Providence threw him out by the scruff of his arrogant neck to fight for his life or to die—which was what he needed. He went to your mountains to scrap with microbes—and he had leisure to discover what a microbe he was himself."
The girl's laugh was a peal of silvery music in the dark. "Were you a microbe?" she demanded. "All these years I've thought you a fairy prince." With a sudden gravity she added, "To one small girl, you opened a gate of dreams, and brought her contentment—" she broke off and the final words were almost whispered—"so long as they remained dreams."
"And now—" he took her up with grave and earnest interest—"now that they have become realities, what of them?"
"That comes later," she reminded him. "We aren't through yet with the little boy who won out with his fighting chance."
"When you knew him your hills had done something for him. They had humanized him. He went as one goes to exile, full of bitterness. Your hills were a miracle of wholesomeness. They cleansed and restored him with the song of their high-riding winds and the whispers of their pines. They confided to him those things that God only says to man in His own out-of-doors. Your mountains were good to me. I became something of a dreamer there, and in those dreams you have always stood as the personal incarnation of those hills. That is why I have thought of you unendingly ever since."
Mary Burton's answer was to shake her head and declare wistfully:
"I almost wish you hadn't seen me again. It would have been better if the illusion could have lasted."
"Since then," he went on, "the little girl has grown up and been crowned, but I shall prefer to think of her as she was before she knew she was to wear Cinderella's slipper."
"I wonder," she murmured, "if you can."
For a time they were silent while the dance music reached them softened by the distance, and then he inquired in a low voice: