"O-oh! You, Mr. Channing!"
One of the sweetest things about the girl to Channing was the queer little tender respect with which she always treated him. Even in their most intimate moments, he was still the great man, the superior order of being. She could not possibly have called him "Percival." Though he chided her for this attitude of respect, it did not displease him.
"I could not sleep in there," she explained, rather breathlessly, "so I came out to see the last of the moon. Of course I must go in again at once."
"Must you? Why, I wonder? I couldn't sleep either. Let's stay where we are!"
She asked, blushing: "But would that be quite proper?"
This first hint of conventionality in the girl surprised and rather touched him. He saw that she was quite painfully aware of the prim little wrapper, the unbound hair, the bare feet thrust into her shoes.
"Why, you little gray nun! Outdoors is quite as 'proper' as indoors—rather more so, in fact. It's the onlooker that makes things proper or improper, and here there are no onlookers.—This is all too wonderful to waste in sleeping!"
It was wonderful. The girl drew a breath of keen, cold ozone into her lungs.
"Isn't it queer," she said with a chuckle, "that mountains smell so sweet and mountaineers—don't? Ugh! fancy living in that stuffy cabin! All very well to sleep there once or twice for a lark, but to live there—!" She rubbed her bare ankles together unhappily. "Mr. Channing, do you suppose they were mosquitoes—?"
"Ssh!" he said. "I hold with the ancient belief that 'nothing exists until it is named.' There'll be several more nights of those bunks, you know.—If you find log-cabins open to suspicion, you ought to try the picturesque thatched-roof cots of Mother England! These mountaineers cling to the old traditions."