with us all.  I went to live with my aunt, and she took herself off to San Francisco with a silly claim against my father’s shipowners.  Heaven only knows how she managed to live there; but she always impressed people with her manners, and some one always helped her!  At last I begged my aunt to let me seek her, and I tracked her here.  There!  If you’ve confessed everything to me, you have made me confess everything to you, and about my own mother, too!  Now, what is to be done?”

“Whatever is agreeable to you is the same to me, Miss Pottinger,” he said formally.

“But you mustn’t call me ‘Miss Pottinger’ so loud.  Somebody might hear you,” she returned mischievously.

“All right—­’cousin,’ then,” he said, with a prodigious blush.  “Supposin’ we go in.”

In spite of the camp’s curiosity, for the next few days they delicately withheld their usual evening visits to Prossy’s mother.  “They’ll be wantin’ to talk o’ old times, and we don’t wanter be too previous,” suggested Wynbrook.  But their verdict, when they at last met the new cousin, was unanimous, and their praises extravagant.  To their inexperienced eyes she seemed to possess all her aunt’s gentility and precision of language, with a vivacity and playfulness all her own.  In a few days the whole camp was in love with her.  Yet she dispensed her favors with such tactful impartiality and with such innocent enjoyment—­free from any suspicion of coquetry—­that there were no heartburnings, and the unlucky man who nourished a fancied slight would have been laughed at by his fellows.  She had a town-bred girl’s curiosity and interest in camp life, which she declared was like a “perpetual picnic,” and her slim, graceful figure halting beside a ditch where the men were working seemed to them as grateful as the new spring sunshine.  The whole camp became tidier; a coat was considered de rigueur at “Prossy’s mother” evenings; there was less horseplay in the trails, and less shouting.  “It’s all very well to talk about ‘old mothers,’” said the cynical barkeeper, “but that gal, single handed, has done more in a week to make the camp decent than old Ma’am Riggs has in a month o’ Sundays.”

Since Prosper’s brief conversation with Miss Pottinger before the house, the question “What is to be done?” had singularly lapsed, nor had it been referred to again by either.  The young lady had apparently thrown herself into the diversions of the camp with the thoughtless gayety of a brief holiday maker, and it was not for him to remind her—­even had he wished to—­that her important question had never been answered.  He had enjoyed her happiness with the relief of a secret shared by her.  Three weeks had passed; the last of the winter’s rains had gone.  Spring was stirring in underbrush and wildwood, in the pulse of the waters, in the sap of the great pines, in the uplifting of flowers.  Small wonder if Prosper’s boyish heart had stirred a little too.