Straightway then the young doctor hurried the departure of the merrymakers. Already the horses stood hitched, and, while the lap-robes were being carried out, a mountaineer who had brought along a sack of apples lined up the men and boys, and at a given word started running down the road, pouring out the apples as he ran while the men and boys scrambled for them, rolling and tussling in the snow.
Just then a fusillade of shots rang from the top of the mountain, but nobody paid any heed. As the party moved away, the mountaineers waved their hands and shouted good-by to the doctor, too shy still to pay much heed to the other “furriners” in the wagon. The doctor looked back once with a grateful sigh of relief, but no one in the wagon knew that there had been any danger that day. How great the danger had been not even the doctor knew till Pleasant Trouble galloped up and whispered behind his hand: the coming vandals had got as far as the top of the dividing ridge, had there quarrelled and fought among themselves, so that, as the party drove away, one invader was at the minute cursing his captors, who were setting him free, and high upon the ridge another lay dead in the snow.
That night the doctor and the marquise, well muffled against the cold, sat on the porch of the superintendent's bungalow while the daughter sat discreetly inside. The flame-light of the ovens licked the snowy ravine above and below; it was their first chance for a talk, and they had it out to the happy end.
“You see,” said the doctor, “there is even more to do over here than in Happy Valley.”
“There is much to do everywhere in these hills,” said the marquise.
“And I need you—oh, how I do need you!” Most untimely, the daughter appeared at the door.
“Then you shall have me,” whispered the marquise.
“Bedtime!” called the girl, and only with his eyes—just then—could the doctor kiss the little marquise. But the next morning, when he went with her as far as the top of the mountain and Pleasant Trouble rode whistling ahead, he had better luck.
“When?” he asked.
“Not till June,” she said firmly. And again he asked: