He felt strangely robbed.  He had expected another half-hour with her.  It astonished him to learn through this tiny disappointment how agreeable the little mountain maid’s society had come to be.

He was wakeful that night till a later hour than usual.

Somehow he was not as thoroughly delighted as he felt that he should be by the prospect of his guests’ arrival.  His journey to the mountains and his sojourn there had been considered rather foolish by his friends, but he had wished to make quite sure that what was said about the wild mountain lands which formed the greater portion of his patrimony—­that they were practically valueless—­was true, ere he gave up all hope of profiting from them.

The building of the railroad through the valley had imbued him with some hope that they might not prove to be as useless as they had been thought to be, and it had been that which had induced him, at the start, to make the journey.

Once arrived he had found the mountain air delightful, the fishing fine, the shooting all that could be wished, and had enjoyed these to their full, investigating, meanwhile, his rough property; but as he lay there in his shack of logs and puncheons he acknowledged to himself that it was none of these things which now made the mountains so attractive.  It was the nymph of the woods pool, the mountain-side Europa on her bull, his little pupil of the alphabet, in plain reality, who now held him to the wilderness.

He wondered just what this could mean.  Could it be possible that he was thinking seriously of the little maid in that way?

He almost laughed at the idea, there alone in the woods cabin, with the stars in their deep velvet canopy twinkling through the window at him and the glow of his cob pipe for company.

But his laugh was not too genuine.  He found himself, to his amazement, comparing Madge, the mountain girl, with Barbara Holton, the elegant daughter of the lowlands, and finding many points in favor of the little rustic maiden.  He wondered just how serious his attentions to fair Barbara had been thought to be by her, her father, Horace Holton, and by other people.  There were many things about Madge Brierly, which, as he sat there, reflective, he found admirable, besides her vivid, vigorous young beauty.  He could not bring himself, as he sat thinking of the two girls, widely separated as they were in the great social plane, unevenly matched as they had been in early training, to admit that the whole advantage was upon the side of Barbara Holton.

And above him, in her lonely little cabin on the towering rock, upon all sides of which the mountain-torrent, making it an isle of safety for her there in the wilderness, roared rythmically, the mountain maiden who so occupied his thoughts was busy with her crude wardrobe.

In complete dissatisfaction she put aside, at length, every garment of her own which she possessed as unsuitable for the great day when she was to meet the bluegrass gentlefolk.