She sighed. "A woman could." She spoke with an instinctive wisdom which her isolated life among the crags and peaks had not deprived her of. "A woman always can. But, my, I hope she will!"
"She will," said Frank. "She will. And my dear Aunt—oh, you will love her."
"Miss Aluth—Aluth—?" She stopped, questioningly, still bothered by the name.
"Miss Alathea," he prompted. "She'll like you and you'll love her."
The girl smiled happily. "Uh-huh." Her acquiescence was immediate. "Reckon maybe I'll love her, all right, and I hope the other will come true, too." Suddenly she was stricken with a fear. "But she won't, though—dressed the way I be!"
"What you wear would make no difference to my Aunt Alathea," Frank protested, "any more than it would make to Colonel Doolittle."
She did not speak again for quite a time, walking along the narrow mountain-path with eyes fixed, but unseeing, on the trail. It was plain that in her mind grave problems were being closely studied.
"Maybe," she said, at length, "I won't be so very awful as you think!"
They had reached the path which led first to the bridge across the mountain-chasm making the rock on which her cabin stood an island, and then, across this draw-bridge, to the cabin itself. She waved a gay and unexpected good-bye to him.
He felt strangely robbed. He had expected another half-hour with her. It astonished him to learn through this tiny disappointment how agreeable the little mountain maid's society had come to be.