“Perhaps not.  I’m afraid I’m out of the habit.”

“Of grunting?  You seem expert enough to satisfy—­”

“No; of being polite.  I’ll apologize if—­if you’ll only go on talking.”

She laughed aloud.

“Or laughing,” he amended promptly.  “Do it again.”

“One can’t laugh to order!” she protested; “or even talk to order.  But why do you stay ’way out here in the mountains if you’re so eager to hear the human voice?”

“The human voice be—­choked!  It’s your human voice I want to hear —­your kind of human voice, I mean.”  “I don’t know that my kind of human voice is particularly different from plenty of other human voices,” she observed, with an effect of fine impartial judgment.

“It’s widely different from the kind that afflicts the suffering ear in this part of the world.  Fourteen months ago I heard the last American girl speak the last American-girl language that’s come within reach of me.  Oh, no,—­there was one, since, but she rasped like a rheumatic phonograph and had brick-colored freckles.  Have you got brick-colored freckles?”

“Stand up and see.”

“No, sir!—­that is, ma’am.  Too much risk.”

“Risk!  Of what?”

“Freckles.  I don’t like freckles.  Not on your voice, anyway.”

“On my voice?  Are you—­”

“Of course I am—­a little.  Any one is who stays down here more than a year.  But that about the voice and the freckles was sane enough.  What I’m trying to say—­and you might know it without a diagram—­is that, from your voice, you ought to be all that a man dreams of when—­well, when he hasn’t seen a real American girl for an eternity.  Now I can sit here and dream of you as the loveliest princess that ever came and went and left a memory of gold and blue in the heart of—­”

“I’m not gold and blue!”

“Of course you’re not.  But your speech is.  I’ll be wise, and content myself with that.  One look might pull down, In irrevocable ruin, all the lovely fabric of my dream.  By the way, are you a Cookie?”

“A what?”

“Cookie.  Tourist.  No, of course you’re not.  No tour would be imbecile enough to touch here.  The question is:  How did you get here?”

“Ah, that’s my secret.”

“Or, rather, are you here at all?  Perhaps you’re just a figment of the overstrained ear.  And if I undertook to look, there wouldn’t be anything there at all.”

“Of course, if you don’t believe in me, I’ll fly away on a sunbeam.”

“Oh, please!  Don’t say that!  I’m doing my best.”

So panic-stricken was the appeal that she laughed again, in spite of herself.

“Ah, that’s better!  Now, come, be honest with me.  You’re not pretty, are you?”

“Me?  I’m as lovely as the dawn.”

“So far, so good.  And have you got long golden—­that is to say, silken hair that floats almost to your knees?”