"He's gone off up in the hills," Billie told her, "chasing some kind of a new moth. You'd be awfully dead by now, Kit, if he hadn't happened to see you go down, because I was in the tent and didn't know anything about it. But it was just like him to dash after you, and pull you out. He did that one day in Washington last winter, and saved a little darky from being run down by a fire engine. I told him he was a regular emergency doctor. I wish I could be like he is; I mean right on the job when there's any real danger."
Kit leaned her chin reflectively on her hand.
"Heroes are such uncomfortable people in everyday life, Billie," she said. "Everybody, even Dad and mother, keep telling me how everlastingly grateful I must be to him for saving my life. I don't see what I can do except thank him, and I have done that."
"Treat him decently," Billie suggested, encouragingly. "Even if you don't like him, hide it."
"Oh, I like him well enough," Kit answered, "only he's never seemed like Ralph, and Honey, and you. I guess I've always resented every one thinking he was so wonderful. It was as though he had had a sort of sweet revenge on me for taking him for a berry hooker."
She stopped as Ralph and Jean came slowly up the drive together. Jean's arms were filled with early goldenrod, and she had some woodbine leaves fastened in a close fillet crown about her smooth dark hair. Ralph came up the veranda steps and seated himself on a pile of straw mats beside the willow chair.
"We've just decided," he announced, "and Jean says I may tell you all. It's going to happen in September, so she can go west with me. How do you like your new brother, Kit?"
"I approve," answered Kit, solemnly. "You know I've always liked you, Ralph, and I hereby bestow the hand of Jean upon you with all my blessings. Are you going to let her keep on painting?"
"She can do anything she likes," Ralph promised. "And if she can find any more beautiful scenery than we have in Saskatchewan and throughout Northwest Canada, then I'll live and die right here in Gilead."
If it had been any one but Ralph MacRae, Mrs. Robbins said, the family would never have given its united consent to Jean's marriage, but ever since that first summer when he had arrived at Greenacres as their unknown landlord, Ralph had been accepted as one of the family circle.