It was Cheyenne Mountain at which she pointed, the last of the chain, and set a little apart, as it were, from the others.  There is as much difference between mountains as between people, as mountain-lovers know, and like people they present characters and individualities of their own.  The noble lines of Mount Cheyenne are full of a strange dignity; but it is dignity mixed with an indefinable charm.  The canyons nestle about its base, as children at a parent’s knee; its cedar forests clothe it like drapery; it lifts its head to the dawn and the sunset; and the sun seems to love it best of all, and lies longer on it than on the other peaks.

Clover did not analyze her impressions, but she fell in love with it at first sight, and loved it better and better all the time that she stayed at St. Helen’s.  “Dr. Hope and Mount Cheyenne were our first friends in the place,” she used to say in after-days.

“How nice it is to be by ourselves!” said Phil, as he lay comfortably on the sofa watching Clover unpack.  “I get so tired of being all the time with people.  Dear me! the room looks quite homelike already.”

Clover had spread a pretty towel over the bare table, laid some books and her writing-case upon it, and was now pinning up a photograph over the mantel-piece.

“We’ll make it nice by-and-by,” she said cheerfully; “and now that I’ve tidied up a little, I think I’ll go and see what has become of Mrs. Watson.  She’ll think I have quite forgotten her.  You’ll lie quiet and rest till dinner, won’t you?”

“Yes,” said Phil, who looked very sleepy; “I’m all right for an hour to come.  Don’t hurry back if the ancient female wants you.”

Clover spread a shawl over him before she went and shut one of the windows.

[Illustration:  “Clover spread a shawl over him before she left, and shut one of the windows.”]

“We won’t have you catching cold the very first morning,” she said.  “That would be a bad story to send back to papa.”

She found Mrs. Watson in very low spirits about her room.

“It’s not that it’s small,” she said.  “I don’t need a very big room; but I don’t like being poked away at the back so.  I’ve always had a front room all my life.  And at Ellen’s in the summer, I have a corner chamber, and see the sea and everything—­It’s an elegant room, solid black walnut with marble tops, and—­Lighthouses too; I have three of them in view, and they are really company for me on dark nights.  I don’t want to be fussy, but really to look out on nothing but a side yard with some trees—­and they aren’t elms or anything that I’m used to, but a new kind.  There’s a thing out there, too, that I never saw before, which looks like one of the giant ants’ nests of Africa in ‘Morse’s Geography’ that I used to read about when I was—­It makes me really nervous.”

Clover went to the window to look at the mysterious object.  It was a cone-shaped thing of white unburned clay, whose use she could not guess.  She found later that it was a receptacle for ashes.