"Well, well!" blurted Levi, but he caught the idea. "I guess women do have a sense of the tight rein now and then; it may lie loose mostly, but it never is quite laid off. 'Tilda, you may cut and run now, for all of me. I'll see to what, you may say, are your animal comforts—parlour car seats, tickets, and some one waiting for you in town, but you kick the heels of your inclinations good and high for once and I bet you and me will run the rest of the race together better, forever after. Whoop it up, 'Tilda, and remember money needn't be a hold back. You've got a big, fat slice coming to you, old girl."
Now that Levi had dropped the reins, the spirit of adventure possessed him. He and Sandy saw Matilda off on her journey three days later, in high spirits.
"I tell you, boy," he confided on the way back to the cabin, "it's a mighty good sign when a woman wants to jump the traces, and a good man isn't going to lick her into submission for doing it. The chances are a woman wouldn't take to kicking if the traces didn't chafe. I've meant to be kind to Matilda, but kindness can be chafing at times. A woman like Matilda, a little, self-sacrificing woman, is real enlightening if you pay attention."
Matilda seemed to develop and expand during that trip North. She ordered her meals with an abandon that electrified the waiters on the train, and then her sense of economy demanded that she should eat what she had ordered. Her tips were dazzling and erratic, but they, and her quaint personality, won for her great comfort and care. She was in better condition, physically, than she had been for many a day when, one golden winter afternoon, she stood in Olive Treadwell's drawing-room in Boston and waited for Cynthia. Mrs. Treadwell was out, but the "young lady," the maid said, was in.
"How very fortunate," thought Matilda and then took her rigid stand across the room. Unconsciously she was waiting to see what Lansing Treadwell had done to this girl of the hills whom he had so ruthlessly and breath-takingly borne away. Lans was, unknowingly, before the most awful bar of judgment he had ever stood—the bar of pure womanhood!
There was a step upon the stairs; a quick, yet faltering step, and then Cynthia entered the room and came toward Matilda Markham with deep, questioning eyes and slow smile. The impression the girl made was to last the rest of Matilda's life. Once, years before, Matilda had seen a rare and lovely butterfly caught in the meshes of a net, and, oddly enough, the memory came to her now as she looked at the sweet, starry-eyed creature advancing. She was as surely caught in an invisible net of some kind as the long-ago butterfly had been. Matilda Markham noted the conventional gown of dull blue with silver trimming; the little slippers to match, and the silken stockings; her eyes rested upon the string of small silver beads wound around the slim throat; all, all were but part of the mesh that caught and held the spirit that had ceased to struggle.
How lovely she was, this Cynthia of Lost Hollow, in spite of the crude conventions! The frank, waiting eyes were as gray-blue as her mountain skies; the lips, half-parted, had not forgotten to smile above the hurt and pain of her tiring days and homesick nights; the smooth braids of shining hair bound the lifted head just as dear Madam Bubble had designed them on the morning when the portrait of "The Biggest of Them All" was hung in the Significant Room.
"You—wanted to see—me?"
The drawl had become sacred to Matilda's ears.
"Yes, my child. I have come from your old home just to see—you."