Elinor shrunk; Mrs. Linceford showed a little high-bred demur about accepting the offered aid of their unknown traveling companion; but the good woman comprehended nothing of this, and went on insisting.

“You’d better let me put it in right off; it’s only just to drop it under the eyelid, and it’ll work round till it finds the speck.  But you can take it and put it in yourself, when you’ve made up your mind, if you’d rather.”  With which she darted her head quickly from side to side, looking about the room, and, spying a scrap of paper on a table, had the eyestone twisted in it in an instant, and pressed it into Elinor’s hand.  “You’ll be glad enough of it, yet,” said she, and then took up her bag, and moved quickly off among the other passengers descending to the train.

“What a funny woman, to be always carrying eyestones about, and putting them in people’s eyes!” said Jeannie.

“It was quite kind of her, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Linceford, with a mingling in her tone of acknowledgment and of polite tolerance for a great liberty.  When elegant people break their necks or their limbs, common ones may approach and assist; as, when a house takes fire, persons get in who never did before; and perhaps a suffering eye may come into the catalogue of misfortunes sufficient to equalize differences for the time being.  But it is queer for a woman to make free to go without her own dinner to offer help to a stranger in pain.  Not many people, in any sense of the word, go about provided with eyestones against the chance cinders that may worry others.  Something in this touched Leslie Goldthwaite with a curious sense of a beauty in living that was not external.

If it had not been for Elinor’s mishap and inability to enjoy, it would have been pure delight from the very beginning, this afternoon’s ride.  They had their seats upon the “mountain side,” where the view of the thronging hills was like an ever-moving panorama; as, winding their way farther and farther up into the heart of the wild and beautiful region, the horizon seemed continually to fill with always vaster shapes, that lifted themselves, or emerged, over and from behind each other, like mustering clans of giants, bestirred and curious, because of the invasion among their fastnesses of this sprite of steam.

“Where you can come down, I can go up,” it seemed to fizz, in its strong, exulting whisper, to the river; passing it always, yet never getting by; tracking, step by step, the great stream backward toward its small beginnings.

“See, there are real blue peaks!” cried Leslie joyously, pointing away to the north and east where the outlines lay faint and lovely in the far distance.

“Oh, I wish I could see!  I’m losing it all!” said Elinor, plaintively and blindfold.

“Why don’t you try the eyestone?” said Jeannie.

But Elinor shrunk, even yet, from deliberately putting that great thing in her eye, agonized already by the presence of a mote.