Now to come upon him so suddenly, looking so dreadful, and to realize that, incredible as it seemed, he must have learned the secret of the cavern, was all so bewildering and startling as to very nearly take away her breath. So she simply stared.
It must be confessed that Peveril's present appearance was not so prepossessing as it had been at other times, and might be again. He had lost his hat, his hair was uncombed, his hands were bruised and soiled, while his clothing was torn and covered with dirt from the underground passages through which he had so recently struggled. But his face was quite clean, for he had just given it a thorough scrubbing, and to it the girl's gaze was principally directed.
It was Peveril who first broke the embarrassing silence.
"I am very glad to see you again," he said, "and to find that you are a real flesh-and-blood girl, instead of only a vision, or a sort of a rock-nymph, as I imagined you might be from the way you disappeared that other time."
"What makes you think I am a girl?" asked Mary Darrell, whose face was the only part of her that Peveril could see.
"Why, because," he began, hesitatingly—"because you are too good-looking to be anything but a girl, and because—Oh, well, because I am certain that you are. What else could you be, anyway?"
Mary Darrell's face was crimson, but still she answered, stoutly, "I might be a boy, you know."
"No, indeed. No boy could blush as you are doing at this moment."
In reply, the girl rose to her feet and stepped out on the ledge in full view of the young man. She was clad in a golf suit, neat-fitting and becoming, but masculine in every detail. She had become so accustomed to dressing in that way that she was perfectly at her ease in the costume, and even preferred it to her own proper garments.
"I beg your pardon," stammered poor Peveril, as he gazed in bewilderment at the apparition thus presented. "I'm awfully ashamed to have made such a stupid mistake, but really, you know—"