“Oh, indeed I will! Just as good as I know how.”
“You’re a bright girl, Zalie, and I feel it in my bones that there’s fine things in store for you. But I’m going to say right now, that if you can, I want you to stick to ma. If you can, Azalea. Of course I don’t want you to stand in your own light.”
The girl slipped a hand into the arm of Pa McBirney. Then she pointed up the valley to where the light shone from the “Outlook.”
“That’s my light, pa,” she said softly.
Haystack Thompson, who had stayed in town for the night, putting up at the inn and intending to return to his neglected farm in the morning, had given Mr. McBirney an account of Azalea’s adventures, but now pa begged to hear them again from the girl’s lips. So she told him everything in her sweet wistful voice.
“It seems like I’m a dreadful lot of trouble to you,” she said. “I can’t see why it is that I had to bring you all this worry.”
“Why tain’t your fault, Zalie. What’s the use of talking like that?”
“It seems like I’m not the way other girls are. I’ve had such a strange life, Pa McBirney.”
“Well it hain’t been very long yet, girl—hardly long enough to be strange, you might say.”
“Yes it has, pa. It’s been short and strange. Now really, you know, I ought to be living in The Shoals. That’s my house—at least, I mean it might have been. That old Colonel Atherton you told Jim about, and that he told me about, was my grandfather.”