“Well, you certainly have peculiar ideas of theatrical personages—for a young lady,” decided Lyster, laughing. “And why you have a grievance against the orthodox handsome hero, I can’t see.”
“He’s too good,” she insisted, with the little frown appearing between her brows, “and no one is ever started in the play with a fair chance against him. He is always called Willie, where the villain would be called Bill—now, isn’t he? Then the girl in the story always falls in love with him at first sight, and that’s enough to rile any villain, especially when he wants her himself.”
“Oh!” and the face of the young man was a study, as he inspected this wonderful ward of Dan. Whatever he had expected from the young swimmer of the Kootenai, from the welcomed guest of Akkomi, he had not expected this sort of thing.
She was twisting her pretty mouth, with a schoolgirl’s earnestness, over a problem, and accenting thus her patient forming of the clay face. She built no barriers up between herself and this handsome stranger, as she had in the beginning with Overton. What she had to say was uttered with all freedom—her likes, her thoughts, her ambitions. At first the fineness and perfection of his apparel had been as grandeur and insolence when contrasted with her own weather-stained, coarse skirt of 58 wool, and her boy’s blouse belted with a strap of leather. Even the blue beads—her one feminine bit of adornment—had been stripped from her throat, that she might give some pleasure to the little bronze-tinted runners on the shore. But the gently modulated, sympathetic tones of Lyster and the kindly fellowship in his eyes, when he looked at her, almost made her forget her own shabbiness (all but those hideous coarse shoes!) for he talked to her with the grace of the people in the plays she loved so, and had not once spoken as though to a stray found in the shelter of an Indian camp.
But he did look curious when she expressed those independent ideas on questions over which most girls would blush or appear at least a little conscious.
“So, you would put a veto on love at first sight, would you?” he asked, laughingly. “And the beauty of the hero would not move you at all? What a very odd young lady you would have me think you! I believe love at first sight is generally considered, by your age and sex, the pinnacle of all things hoped for.”
A little color did creep into her face at the unnecessary personal construction put on her words. She frowned to hide her embarrassment and thrust out her lips in a manner that showed she had little vanity as to her features and their attractiveness.
“But I don’t happen to be a young lady,” she retorted; “and we think as we please up here in the bush. Maybe your proper young ladies would be very odd, too, if they were brought up out here like boys.”
She arose to her feet, and he saw more clearly then how slight she was; her form and face were much more childish in character than her speech, and the face was looking at him with resentful eyes. 59
“I’m going back to camp.”