“I certainly do.”

“Sometimes—­I am in the big woods.”

“Where—­specially?” Truedale was playing this new game with the foolish skill of the novice.

“There’s a Hollow—­where—­” (Nella-Rose paused) “where the laurel tangle is like a jungle—­”

Truedale broke in:  “I know it!  There’s a little stream running through it, and—­trails.”

“Yes!” Nella-Rose leaned back and showed her white teeth alluringly.

“I—­I should not—­permit this!” For a moment Truedale broke through the thin ice of delight that was luring him to unknown danger and fell upon the solid rock of conservatism.

“Why?” The eyes, so tenderly innocent, confronted him appealingly.  “There are nuts there and—­and other things!  You are just teasing; you’ll let me—­show you the way about?”

The girl was all child now and made Truedale ashamed to hold her to any absurd course that his standards acknowledged but that hers had never conceived.

“Of course.  I’ll be glad to have you for a guide.  Jim White has no ideas about nuts and things—­he goes to the woods to kill something; he’s there now.  I dare say mere are other things in the mountains besides—­prey?”

Nella-Rose nodded.

“Let’s sit by the fire!” she suddenly said.  “I—­I want to tell you—­something, and then I must go.”

The lack of shyness and reserve might so easily have become boldness—­but they did not!  The girl was like a creature of the wilds which, knowing no reason for fear, was revelling in heretofore unsuspected enjoyment.  Truedale pulled the couch to the hearth for Nella-Rose, piled the pillows on one end and then seated himself on the stump of a tree which served as a settee.

“Now, then!” he said, keeping his eyes on his breezy little guest.  “What have you got to tell me—­before you go?”

“It’s something that happened—­long ago.  You will not laugh if I tell you?  You laugh right much.”

“I?  You think I laugh a good deal?  Good Lord!  Some folk think I don’t laugh enough.”  He had his friends back home in mind, and somehow the memory steadied him for an instant.

“P’r’aps they-all don’t know you as well as I do.”  This with amusing conviction.

“Perhaps they don’t.”  Truedale was deadly solemn.  “But go on, Nella-Rose.  I promise not to laugh now.”

“It was the beginning of—­you!” The girl turned her eyes to the fire—­she was quaintly demure.  “At first when I saw you looking in that window, yonder, I was right scared.”

Jim White’s statement that Nella-Rose wasn’t more than half real seemed, in the light of present happenings, little less than bald fact.

“It was the way you looked—­way back there when I was ten years old.  I had run away—­”

“Are you always running away?” asked Truedale from the hollow depths of unreality.

“I run away a smart lot.  You have to if you want to—­see things and be different.”