“There shore is.  I’ll send Charley, one of our hired boys.”

“Thank you.  Then tell him to say there is a lady here from New York to see him, and it is very important.”

Flo Hutter clapped her hands and laughed with glee.  Her gladness gave Carley a little twinge of conscience.  Jealously was an unjust and stifling thing.

Carley was conducted up a broad stairway and along a boarded hallway to a room that opened out on the porch.  A steady low murmur of falling water assailed her ears.  Through the open door she saw across the porch to a white tumbling lacy veil of water falling, leaping, changing, so close that it seemed to touch the heavy pole railing of the porch.

This room resembled a tent.  The sides were of canvas.  It had no ceiling.  But the roughhewn shingles of the roof of the house sloped down closely.  The furniture was home made.  An Indian rug covered the floor.  The bed with its woolly clean blankets and the white pillows looked inviting.

“Is this where Glenn lay—­when he was sick?” queried Carley.

“Yes,” replied Flo, gravely, and a shadow darkened her eyes.  “I ought to tell you all about it.  I will some day.  But you must not be made unhappy now. . . .  Glenn nearly died here.  Mother or I never left his side—­for a while there—­when life was so bad.”

She showed Carley how to open the little stove and put the short billets of wood inside and work the damper; and cautioning her to keep an eye on it so that it would not get too hot, she left Carley to herself.

Carley found herself in an unfamiliar mood.  There came a leap of her heart every time she thought of the meeting with Glenn, so soon now to be, but it was not that which was unfamiliar.  She seemed to have a difficult approach to undefined and unusual thoughts.  All this was so different from her regular life.  Besides she was tired.  But these explanations did not suffice.  There was a pang in her breast which must owe its origin to the fact that Glenn Kilbourne had been ill in this little room and some other girl than Carley Burch had nursed him.  “Am I jealous?” she whispered.  “No!” But she knew in her heart that she lied.  A woman could no more help being jealous, under such circumstances, than she could help the beat and throb of her blood.  Nevertheless, Carley was glad Flo Hutter had been there, and always she would be grateful to her for that kindness.

Carley disrobed and, donning her dressing gown, she unpacked her bags and hung her things upon pegs under the curtained shelves.  Then she lay down to rest, with no intention of slumber.  But there was a strange magic in the fragrance of the room, like the piny tang outdoors, and in the feel of the bed, and especially in the low, dreamy hum and murmur of the waterfall.  She fell asleep.  When she awakened it was five o’clock.  The fire in the stove was out, but the water was still warm.  She bathed and dressed, not without care, yet as swiftly as was her habit at home; and she wore white because Glenn had always liked her best in white.  But it was assuredly not a gown to wear in a country house where draughts of cold air filled the unheated rooms and halls.  So she threw round her a warm sweater-shawl, with colorful bars becoming to her dark eyes and hair.