Alas, alas!  The matter was a tragedy to her.  How could she have been so stupid as to fail to think of this at first?  She stood there with flushed face, despairing, looking at the mystic symbols with slowly sinking heart.

Suddenly, though the crackling of the fire filled her ears, she was aware, by some subtle sense, that she was now not wholly solitary there.  Without a sound to tell her, she was conscious that some other person had within the moment come into the clearing.  Hastily she looked about.  To her amazement, and, for a moment, to her great dismay, she saw, standing on the clearing’s edge, the young man who had, not long before, unknowingly invaded her seclusion at the pool.

Instantly her body became fiercely conscious.  Prickling thrills, not due to bonfire heat, shot over it.  Shame sent the blood in mantling blushes to her cheeks, although she tried to stop it.  Why should she blush at sight of him?  True, she had been there in the water, bare as any new-born babe, when he had reached the pool’s edge—­but he had not seen her.  To him she, quite undoubtedly, was a mere strange mountain maid, unrecognized.  Self-consciousness then was quite absurd.

And this man was a stranger and was on her land.  She must not forget her mountain courtesy and fail to make him welcome.

“Howdy,” she said briefly.

“Howdy, little girl?” said he, and looked at her and smiled.

This form of address much amused her.  She was not far beyond sixteen, but sixteen is counted womanhood, there in the mountains, and often is an age for wife—­and motherhood as well.  “Little girl,” to her, seemed laughable.  But then she suddenly remembered that to stop their flapping, when they were all soaked, against her ankles, she had pinned her skirts up—­and she was not tall.  The mistake, perhaps, was natural.

“Got a fire here?” he inquired, inanely, for the fire was very much in evidence.

“Looks like it, don’t it?” she said somewhat saucily, but robbed the comment of offense by smiling somewhat shyly at him as he stood there.

He was better looking, she reflected, now that she had an unobstructed view of him, even than he had appeared when she had peered at him from her concealment behind the log and barricade of rushes.  Of course he was a “foreigner,” and, therefore, a mere weakling, not to be considered seriously as a specimen of sturdy manhood (how often had she heard the mountain men speak of the lowlands men with scorn as weaklings?) but, none the less, he interested and attracted her, even if he did not inspire her with respect.

He laughed.  “It does,” said he, “looks very much like it.  Been burning brush?”

“No,” she replied, “jest warmin’ up a little.”

“Why, it’s not cold.”

“I—­I was wet.”

“Wet?” said he, astonished.

She saw her slip, and flushed.  “Fell in the crik,” she answered briefly, hastily and falsely.