Colina laughed out of sheer vexation.  “The silly ideas fathers have!” she cried.  “Nobody can look after me, not you, not my aunt, nobody but myself!  Why won’t you understand that!  I don’t know exactly what dangers you fancy are threatening me.  If it is from men, be at ease!  I can put the fear of God into them!  It is the sweet and gentle girl you would like to have that is in danger there!”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to go back,” said Gaviller.

Colina drew her beautiful straight brows together.  “You make me think you simply want to get me off your hands,” she said sullenly.

Gaviller shook his head.  “You know I love to have you with me,” he said simply.

“Then consider me a fixture!” said Colina serenely.  “This is my country!” she went on enthusiastically.  “It suits me.  I like its uglinesses and its hardships, too!  I hated it in the city.  Do you know what they called me?—­the wild Highlander!

“Up here everybody understands my wildness, and thinks none the worse of me.  It was different in the city—­you’ve always lived in the north, you old innocent—­you don’t know!  Men, for instance, in society they have a curious logic.  They seem to think if a girl is natural she must be bad!  Sometimes they acted on that assumption—­”

“What did I tell you!” cried her father.  “Men are the same everywhere!”

“Well,” said Colina, smiling to herself, “they didn’t get very far.  And no man ever tried it twice.  Up here—­how different.  I don’t have to think of such things.”

“I have to think of settling you in life,” said Gaviller gloomily.  “There is no one for you up here.”

“I’m not bothering my head about that,” said Colina.  She went on with a kind of splendid insolence:  “Every man wants me.  I’ll choose one when I’m ready.  I can’t see anything in men except as comrades.  The decent ones are timid with women, and the bold ones are—­well—­rather beastly.  I’m looking for a man who’s brave and decent, too.  If there’s no such thing—­”

She rose from the table.  Colina’s was a body designed to fill a riding-habit, and she wore one from morning till night.  She was as tall as a man of middle height, and her tawny hair piled on top of her head made her seem taller.

“Well?” said Gaviller.

“Oh, I’ll choose the handsomest beast I can find,” she said, laughing over her shoulder and escaping from the room before he could answer.

John Gaviller finished his egg with a frown.  Colina had this trick of breaking things off in the middle, and it irritated him.  He had an orderly mind.

CHAPTER IV.

The meeting.

Colina groomed her own horse, whistling like a boy.  Saddling him, she rode east along the trail by the river, with the fenced grain fields on her right hand.

Beyond the fields she could gallop at will over the rolling, grassy bottoms, among the patches of scrub and willow.