Then, suddenly, Nella-Rose did something that shattered the last scrap of self-control that was associated with the trusty Kendall and his good example.  She raised a bit of food on her fork and held it out to Truedale, her lovely eyes looking wistfully into his.

“Please!  I feel so ornery eating alone.  I want to—­share!  Please play party with me!”

Truedale tried to say “I had my dinner an hour ago”; instead, he leaned across his folded arms and murmured, as if quite outside his own volition: 

“I—­I love you!”

Nella-Rose dropped the fork and leaned back.  Her lids fell over the wide eyes—­the smile faded from her lips.

“Do you belong to any one—­else, Nella-Rose?”

“No—­oh! no.”  This like a frightened cry.

“But others—­some one must have told you—­of love.  Do you know what love means?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

And now she looked at him.  Her eyes were dark, her face deadly pale; her lips were so red that in the whiteness they seemed the only trace of colour.

“How do I know?  Why because—­nothing else matters.  It seems like I’ve been coming all my life to it—­and now it just says:  ’Here I am, Nella-Rose—­here’!”

“I, too, have been coming to it all my life, little girl.  I did not know—­I was driven.  I rebelled, because I did not know; but nothing else does matter, when—­love gets you!”

“No.  Nothing matters.”  The girl’s voice was rapt and dreamy.  Truedale put his hands across the space dividing them and took hold of hers.

“You will be—­mine, Nella-Rose?”

“Seems like I must be!”

“Yes.  Doesn’t it?  Do you—­you must understand, dear?  I mean to live the rest of my life here in the hills—­your hills.  You once said one was of the hills or one wasn’t; will they let me stay?”

“Yes”—­almost fiercely—­“but—­but your folks—­off there—­will they let you stay?”

“I have no folks, Nella-Rose.  I’m lonely and poor—­at least I was until I found you!  The hills have given me—­everything; I mean to serve them well in return.  I want you for my wife, Nella-Rose; we’ll make a home—­somewhere—­it doesn’t matter; it will be a shelter for our love and—­” He stopped short.  Reality and conventions made a last vain appeal.  “I don’t want you ever again to go out of my sight.  You’re mine and nothing could make that different—­but” (and this came quickly, desperately) “there must be a minister somewhere—­let’s go to him!  Do not let us waste another precious day.  When he makes you mine by his”—­Truedale was going to say “ridiculous jargon” but he modified it to—­“his authority, no one in all God’s world can take you from me.  Come, come now, sweetheart!”

In another moment he would have had her in his arms, but she held him off.

“I’m mighty afraid of old Jim White!” she said.

Truedale laughed, but the words brought him to his senses.