“Perfect,” she whispered. “And the picture we have been making, will it be perfect, too?” Her brow wrinkled. She was to know. To-night was the great night. The picture was finished. To-night came the preview.
“At midnight,” she breathed. “Midnight, one o’clock, and after that my hour of enchantment. Shall it truly be? Shall—?”
She broke short off to cast a hurried glance up the slope above her. Had she caught some sound, the snapping of a twig, the rolling of a stone?
“Perhaps nothing,” she told herself. “I am excited. This is a grand night.”
Ah, yes, this was the night of nights. Two weeks had passed since Lorena LeMar had walked out of her richly furnished apartment and Jeanne had walked in.
Two weeks, fourteen days, and such days as they had been! Jeanne sighed as she thought of it now. And yet her lips were able to form the words “Golden Days.” They had been just that, beautiful, glorious, golden days.
“It is perfect, this mountain,” she whispered. “Even in the dark one senses the beauty of it. Ah, the rushing cold water, the scent of mountain ivy, the glint of sunbeams through the trees!”
Yes, it was a perfect little corner of Big Black Mountain, but the little French girl’s thoughts were far away. They had wandered to the spot where Big Black Mountain itself stretched away, away and away until its glorious green turned to blue that blended with a cloudless sky.
She was thinking of Pietro who rode a donkey so badly he had actually fallen off more than once, and who sang his Italian songs so divinely.
She was thinking of Tom Tobin and wondering vaguely which of the two she liked best.