He showed her the picture of his mother.  By the fire glow she studied it intently.  Her eyes brimmed with tears.

“She’s so lovely and so sweet—­and she had to go away and leave her little baby when she was so young.  I don’t wonder you worship her.  I would, too.”

Roy did not try to thank her in words.  He choked up in his throat and nodded.

“You can see how fine and dainty she was,” the girl went on.  “I’d rather be like that than anything else in the world—­and, of course, I never can be.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he protested warmly.  “You’re as fine as they grow.”

She smiled, a little wistfully.  “Nice of you to say so, but I know better.  I’m not a lady.  I’m just a harum-scarum, tempery girl that grew up in the hills.  If I didn’t know it, that wouldn’t matter.  But I do know it, and so like a little idiot I pity myself because I’m not like nice girls.”

“Thank Heaven, you’re not!” he cried.  “I’ve never met a girl fit to hold a candle to you.  Why, you’re the freest, bravest, sweetest thing that ever lived.”

The hot blood burned slowly into her cheek under its dusky coloring.  His words were music to her, and yet they did not satisfy.

“You’re wrapping it up nicely, but we both know that I’m a vixen when I get angry,” she said quietly.  “We used to have an old Indian woman work for us.  When I was just a wee bit of a thing she called me Little Cactus Tongue.”

“That’s nothing.  The boys were probably always teasing you and you defended yourself.  In a way the life you have led has made you hard.  But it is just a surface hardness nature has provided as a protection to you.”

“Since it is there, I don’t see that it helps much to decide why it is a part of me,” she returned with a wan little smile.

“But it does,” he insisted.  “It matters a lot.  The point is that it isn’t you at all.  Some day you’ll slough it the way a butterfly does its shell.”

“When?” she wanted to know incredulously.

He did not look at her while he blurted out his answer.  “When you are happily married to a man you love who loves you.”

“Oh!  I’m afraid that will be never.”  She tried to say it lightly, but her face glowed from the heat of an inward fire.

“There’s a deep truth in the story of the princess who slept the years away until the prince came along and touched her lips with his.  Don’t you think lots of people are hampered by their environment?  All they need is escape.”  He suggested this with a shy diffidence.

“Oh, we all make that excuse for ourselves,” she answered with a touch of impatient scorn.  “I’m all the time doing it.  I say if things were different I would be a nice, sweet-tempered, gentle girl and not fly out like that Katherine in Shakespeare’s play.  But I know all the time it isn’t true.  We have to conquer ourselves.  There is no city of refuge from our own temperaments.”