"Thirty odd years. Is it likely, now, that I should miss a stream as good as this one is?"
"You are like the rest of them, Mr. Lomax. You're awfully proud of having lived here all your life, and you—not exactly look down on, but you—pity us who come from the South."
"Do I?" smiled Griff. "How do you know that?"
"Oh, you do; you all do! I don't like your people up here; they're too hard."
"Did you ever get to the heart of one of us? We're as soft as butter, once you smash through the rind."
"But you never confess it when—when people want you to."
Greta Rotherson blushed, as she spoke, in a vexed kind of way, and Griff knew, as well as could be, that she was thinking of the preacher. But he daren't so much as hint that he knew the state of affairs, though he was always jogging Gabriel's elbow, and striving to push the silly fellow nearer to his goal.
"We are crossed in the grain, I fear. Don't be too hard on us, Miss Rotherson," he laughed.
And so, what with one thing and another, they talked for half an hour, these two, seated one on each end of the warm pine-log. They laughed, and jested, and teased each other, from sheer vigour of youth and good spirits, until Griff looked at the sun, which was a reliable watch to him.
"It is getting late," he said, rising and stretching his long legs. "Have I been keeping you from your bath all this time?"