“Can you tell me, little sister, how I can get to Middle Fork?”

Middle Fork was the village at the end of the six-mile mountain descent, and Mary, who knew every trail and woodland path, told him, not only of the road, but of a passable short-cut.

The girl had come to judge human faces through the eyes of her own circumstance, and those of the men and women about her wore for the most part the resignation of surrender and hardship, but this man’s face was different.  He was a man to her eleven years, though a more experienced eye would have seen that he was hardly more than a prematurely old boy.  Lines traced a network around his eyes, but they were whimsical lines such as come from persistent laughter—­the sort of laughter that insists on expressing itself even in the face of misfortune.  His open mackinaw collar revealed a carelessly knotted scarf decorated with a large black pearl, and as he drew off a glove she noticed that his brown hand was slender and that one finger wore a heavily carved ring, from whose quaint setting glowed the cool, bright light of an emerald.  Her frank curiosity showed so plainly in her face that the fine wrinkles about the young man’s eyes became little radiants of amusement centering around gray pupils and his lips parted in a smile over very even teeth.

There are a few men in the world whom we feel that we have always known, when once we have seen them, and upon whom we find ourselves bestowing confidences as soon as we have said, “Good-day.”  Perhaps they are the isolated survivors of knight-errant days, whose business it is to listen to the troubles of others.

It was only the matter of minutes before Mary was chatting artlessly with this traveler of the mountain road, and since she was a child she was talking of herself, while he nodded gravely and listened with a deference of attention that was to her new and disarmingly charming.

He, too, was just now an exile here in the hills, he explained, but before he came he had lived all over the world.  He had studied under tutors while traveling about the Continent, and being prepared to take up his work in the banking house which his grandfather had established and his father had extended in scope.  Then it had happened.

“What happened?” The child of Lake Forsaken put the question eagerly, and his reply was laconic, though he smiled down from the buggy seat with a peculiarly naive twist of his lips.  “Bugs,” he told her.

“What kind of bugs?” It seemed strange to Mary that a man would let such small creatures as flies or spiders or even big beetles stand between himself and a great bank.

“I beg your pardon,” he laughed.  “I forgot that you lived in a world unsullied by such argot.  You know what a lunger is?”

That she did know.  It is a term familiar enough in the mountains to which come refugees from the white plague, seeking in the tonic air a healing for their sickened lungs.