“And so you see,” said the strange young man, “I have built me a log shack back in the hills where I amuse myself writing verses—­which, fortunately, no one reads—­and doing equally inconsequential things.  Now I’m going down for a few days in the city.  I can only go when the weather is fine and when winter sets in, I must come back and bury myself with no companions except some books and a pair of snowshoes.”

“Are you going to die?” she asked him in large-eyed concern.

“Some day I am,” he laughed.  “But I’m rather stubborn.  I’m going to postpone that as long as possible.  Several doctors tell me that I have an even chance.  It seems to be a sort of fifty-fifty bet between the bugs and me.  I suppose a fellow oughtn’t to ask more than an even break.”

She stood regarding him with vast interest.  She had never known a man before who chatted so casually about the probable necessity of dying.  He grew as she watched him to very interesting and romantic proportions.

“What’s your name?” she demanded.

“My last name’s Edwardes,” he told her.  And it was only her own out-of-the-world ignorance that kept her from recognizing in the name a synonym for titanic finance.  “In front of that they put a number of ridiculous prefixes when I was quite young and helpless.  There is Jefferson and Doorland and others.  At college they called me Pup.”

In return for his confidence, the girl told him who she was and where she lived and how old she was.

“You say your name is Mary Burton?  I must remember that because in, say ten years, provided I last that long, I expect to hear of you.”

“Hear of me?  Why?” she demanded.

The stranger bent forward and coughed, and when the paroxysm had ended he smiled whimsically again.

“I’ll tell you a secret, though God knows it’s a perilous thing to feed a woman’s vanity—­even a woman of eleven.  Did anyone ever tell you that you are possessed of a marvelous pair of eyes?”

Instinctively little Mary Burton flinched as though she had been struck and she raised one hand to her face to touch her long lashes.  Silent tears welled up; tears of indignant pain because she thought she was being cruelly ridiculed.

But the stranger had no such thought.  If to the uneducated opinion of Lake Forsaken, Mary’s face was a matter for jest and libel, the impression made on the young man who had been reared in the capitals of Europe was quite different.  He had been sent, on the verge of manhood, into the hermit’s seclusion with the hermit’s opportunity of reflecting on all he had seen, and digesting his experience into a philosophy beyond his years.

Perhaps had Mary been born into her own Puritan environment two centuries earlier, she might have faced even sterner criticism, for there was without doubt a strange uncommonplaceness about her which the thought of that day might have charged to the attendance of witches about her birth.  The promise of beauty she had, but a beauty unlike that of common standards.  It was a quality that at first caught the beholder like the shock of a plunge into cold water, and then set him tingling through his pulses—­also like a plunge into an icy pool.