“Mister Outlander, we’re going to be neighbours, aren’t we?”
“Yes—neighbours!” Truedale took the hand with a distinct sense of suffocation, “but why do you call me an outlander?”
“Because—you are! You’re not of our mountains.”
“No, I wish I were!”
“Wishing can’t make you. You are—or you aren’t.”
Truedale noted the girl’s language. Distorted and crude as it often was, it was never positively illiterate. This surprised him.
“You—oh! you’re not going yet!” He put his hand out, for the definite way in which Nella-Rose turned was ominous. Already she seemed to belong to the cabin room—to Truedale himself. Not a suggestion of strangeness clung to her. It was as if she had always been there but that his eyes had been holden.
“I must go!”
“Wait—oh! Nella-Rose. Let me walk part of the way with you. I—I have a thousand things to say.”
But she was gone out of the door, down the path.