Lescott nodded. He remembered the cabin of the Widow Miller, and
Horton rode with him, albeit grudgingly.
Adrienne sprang lightly to the ground, laughingly rejecting Samson's assistance, and came with him to the top of a stile, from which he pointed to the log cabin, set back in its small yard, wherein geese and chickens picked industriously about in the sandy earth.
A huge poplar and a great oak nodded to each other at either side of the door, and over the walls a clambering profusion of honeysuckle vine contended with a mass of wild grape, in joint effort to hide the white chinking between the dark logs. From the crude milk-benches to the sweep of the well, every note was one of neatness and rustic charm. Slowly, he said, looking straight into her eyes:
"This is Sally's cabin, Drennie."
He watched her expression, and her lips curved up in the same sweetness of smile that had first captivated and helped to mold him.
"It's lovely!" she cried, with frank delight. "It's a picture."
"Wait!" he commanded. Then, turning toward the house, he sent out the long, peculiarly mournful call of the whippoorwill, and, at the signal, the door opened, and on the threshold Adrienne saw a slender figure. She had called the cabin with its shaded dooryard a picture, but now she knew she had been wrong. It was only a background. It was the girl herself who made and completed the picture. She stood there in the wild simplicity that artists seek vainly to reproduce in posed figures. Her red calico dress was patched, but fell in graceful lines to her slim bare ankles, though the first faint frosts had already fallen.
Her red-brown hair hung loose and in masses about the oval of a face in which the half-parted lips were dashes of scarlet, and the eyes large violet pools. She stood with her little chin tilted in a half- wild attitude of reconnoiter, as a fawn might have stood. One brown arm and hand rested on the door frame, and, as she saw the other woman, she colored adorably.
Adrienne thought she had never seen so instinctively and unaffectedly lovely a face or figure. Then the girl came down the steps and ran toward them.
"Drennie," said the man, "this is Sally. I want you two to love each other." For an instant, Adrienne Lescott stood looking at the mountain girl, and then she opened both her arms.