So he smiled at her, quite willing to be argued with and entertained; and at his suggestion she shyly seated herself on the sill outside in the sunlight.
“Have you lived here long?” he asked encouragingly.
“Not very,” she said, eyes downcast, her clasped hands lying loosely over one knee. The soft, creamy-tinted fingers occupied his attention for a moment; the hand resembled the hand of “quality”; so did the ankle and delicate arch of her naked foot, half imprisoned in the coarse shoe under her skirt’s edge.
He had often heard that some of these mountaineers had pretty children; here, evidently, was a most fascinating example.
“Is your mother living?” he asked pleasantly.
“No, sir.”
He thought to himself that she must resemble her dead mother, because the man whom the cavalry had caught in the creek was a coarse-boned, red-headed ruffian, quite impossible to reconcile as the father of this dark-haired, dark-eyed, young forest creature, with her purely-molded limbs and figure and sensitive fashion of speaking. He turned to her curiously:
“So you have not always lived here on the mountain.”
“No, not always.”
“I suppose you spent a whole year away from home at boarding-school,” he suggested with patronizing politeness.