"I like this," she said, waving her hand toward the valley.
King looked at her, but she had not so much as turned her head towards him. For the first time he was able to look at her without embarrassment. He was no artist to analyze the fine points of symmetry in face and figure. But he was a man—and the man in him told him that she was beautiful. What he liked best about her was the strength of her beauty. He knew at a glance that she was not of the delicate, clinging kind that practise a languid air and never forget their sex. Here was a girl whose heart-beat was strong with the confidence and the reliance she had learned to place in herself—and every line of her face, every movement of her body, bore evidence to the fact. And yet, as she sat and looked out over the valley half hidden under the mists, there was a soft warmth in her dark eyes that made her presence luminous. For King the girl who sat before him embodied in tangible form, it seemed, all he had ever aspired to, all he had ever even vaguely dreamed of.
Her voice, when she spoke, was not the voice of reproach that she had used earlier in the afternoon. Now it was soft, quiet, even deep.
"I like it, too," he said, in response to her simple expression of admiration for what lay before them. "But you haven't come all this way for that"—he waved his hand gently in the direction of the valley.
She turned to him quickly. "No—I have seen it before—though I don't remember when it was ever so beautiful."
"Nor I," thought King, though he kept his thoughts to himself.
"What is your name?" she asked suddenly and with a directness that brought a smile to King's face.
He told her.
"And I am Cherry McBain—my father is Keith McBain—'Old Silent,' the men call him," she replied. "I came to tell you that I need your help—not for me—for my father."
King looked at her strangely. "But a man," he said slowly, "a man who takes a dare—"