I looked at the girl who was standing beside me, then cast a glance around at the very unusual landscape.
We were standing on the summit of a mountain some two thousand feet high, looking into a cup-shaped depression or crater, on the edges of which we stood.
This low, flat-topped mountain, as I say, was grassy and quite treeless, although it rose like a truncated sugar-cone out of a wilderness of trees which stretched for miles below us, north, south, east, and west, bordered on the horizon by towering blue mountains, their distant ranges enclosing the forests as in a vast amphitheatre.
From the centre of this enormous green floor of foliage rose our grassy hill, and it appeared to be the only irregularity which broke the level wilderness as far as the base of the dim blue ranges encircling the horizon.
Except for the log bungalow of Mr. Blythe on the eastern edge of this grassy plateau, there was not a human habitation in sight, nor a trace of man's devastating presence in the wilderness around us.
Again I looked questioningly at the girl beside me and she looked back at me rather seriously.
"Shall we seat ourselves here in the sun?" she asked.
I nodded.
Very gravely we settled down side by side on the thick green grass.
"Now," she said, "I shall tell you why I wrote you to come out here. Shall I?"