“She’s a blessed trump.  Nan always understood Mary better than I; Mary liked Nan the best of all, but I’m going to cultivate Mary.  There is something about her like these hidden words—­it must be brought out.”

“To think of her caring for and loving that poor, deserted creature on that lonely peak all this time!” Doris went back to the story.  “Father Noble says the trail up there is the worst on the mountain, yet Mary went every day.  She mended the cabin and kept the old woman clean and clothed and happy—­to the very end.  Think of her alone in that cabin at night when the poor soul passed away!  Mary was always so timid, too, and superstitious—­and we never suspecting!”

“And then,” Joan took up the thread, “those ten miles to get Father Noble so that there might be a proper funeral, and Nancy’s wedding having to wait while they saw the thing properly through.  Oh!  Aunt Dorrie, it’s like a glorious old comedy with so much humanity in it that it hurts.  Can you not just see that funeral as Father Noble described it?”

Joan stood up, her eyes shining; the polishing cloth held out daintily from the pretty blue gown.

“‘Twilight and evening star’ effect, and those silent, amazed folks that Mary had compelled to come up the trail; the children and dogs and that comical boy tolling an old, cracked dinner bell; the procession to the clump of trees where the old women’s children and grandchildren are buried—­why, Aunt Doris, I see it all like a wonderful picture!  There’s no place on earth like these hills.”

Doris saw it, too, as Joan graphically portrayed it—­but she was thinking still of Mary; she was baffled.

“And yet,” she said, thoughtfully, “you cannot get Mary to talk about it, and she turned quite fiercely upon poor old Jed when he asked his simple questions.  She’s hard as well as gentle.”

“And old Jed”—­Joan waved her cloth—­“here’s to him!  Think of him crying because The Ship wouldn’t sail off The Rock and insisting that the old woman on Thunder Peak had something in her arms—­that ought to have gone on The Ship, not in the ground.  The place and the people, Aunt Dorrie, are like a Grimm fairy tale.  I’m going to have the time of my life reading them and playing with them.”

Joan was thinking, as she often did now, of touching the lives of others—­all others who pressed close to her.  She had never been so keen or vivid before—­the calls upon her were awakening the depths of her nature.  She had travelled far only to come home to find Truth.

“I am afraid I shall never be able to understand these silent, unresponsive folk, Joan.”  Doris shook her head—­she was realizing her own shortcomings; her incapacity for new undertakings; “they frighten me.  I have always been able to make an ideal seem real, dear, but I am afraid I fail utterly when it comes to making the real seem ideal—­particularly when it is not lovely.”

“Well, then, duckie, just let me do the interpreting.  Father Noble is going to take me under his big, flapping capes and speak a good word for me.”