Sin Saxon was all life, and spring, and fun.  She climbed at least three Feather-Caps, dancing from stone to stone with tireless feet, and bounding back and forth with every gay word that it occurred to her to say to anybody.  Pictures?  She made them incessantly.  She was a living dissolving view.  You no sooner got one bright look or graceful attitude than it was straightway shifted into another.  She kept Frank Scherman at her side for the first half-hour, and then, perhaps, his admiration or his muscles tired, for he fell back a little to help Madam Routh up a sudden ridge, and afterwards, somehow, merged himself in the quieter group of strangers.

By and by one of the Arnalls whispered to Mattie Shannon,—­“He’s sidled off with her, at last.  Did you ever know such a fellow for a new face?  But it’s partly the petticoat.  He’s such an artist’s eye for color.  He was raving about her all the while she stood hanging those shawls among the pines to keep the wind from Mrs. Linceford.  She isn’t downright pretty either.  But she’s got up exquisitely!”

Leslie Goldthwaite, in her lovely mountain dress, her bright bloom from enjoyment and exercise, with the stray light through the pines burnishing the bronze of her hair, had innocently made a second picture, it would seem.  One such effects deeper impression, sometimes, than the confusing splendor of incessant changes.

“Are you looking for something?  Can I help you?” Frank Scherman had said, coming up to her, as she and her friend Dakie, a little apart from the others, were poising among some loose pebbles.

“Nothing that I have lost,” Leslie answered, smiling.  “Something I have a very presumptuous wish to find.  A splendid garnet geode, if you please!”

“That’s not at all impossible,” returned the young man.  “We’ll have it before we go down,—­see if we don’t!”

Frank Scherman knew a good deal about Feather-Cap, and something of geologizing.  So he and Leslie—­Dakie Thayne, in his unswerving devotion, still accompanying—­“sidled off” together, took a long turn round under the crest, talking very pleasantly—­and restfully, after Sin Saxon’s continuous brilliancy—­all the way.  How they searched among loose drift under the cliff, how Mr. Scherman improvised a hammer from a slice of rock; and how, after many imperfect specimens, they did at last “find a-purpose” an irregular oval of dull, dusky stone, which burst with a stroke into two chalices of incrusted crimson crystals,—­I ought to be too near the end of a long chapter to tell.  But this search and this finding, and the motive of it, were the soul and the crown of Leslie’s pleasure for the day.  She did not even stop to think how long she had had Frank Scherman’s attention all to herself, or the triumph that it was in the eyes of the older girls, among whom he was excessively admired, and not very disguisedly competed for.  She did not know how fast she was growing to be a sort of admiration herself among them, in their girls’ fashion, or what she might do, if she chose, in the way of small, early belleship here at Outledge with such beginning,—­how she was “getting on,” in short, as girls express it.  And so, as Jeannie Hadden asked, “Where was the satisfaction?”