mile wreathed the girl's lips and she rose with
rare dignity and held out her thin, delicate hand:

"Mister Outlander, we're going to be neighbours, aren't we?"

"Yes--neighbours!" Truedale took the hand with a distinct sense of
suffocation, "but why do you call me an outlander?"

"Because--you are! You're not _of_ our mountains."

"No, I wish I were!"

"Wishing can't make you. You are--or you aren't."

Truedale noted the girl's language. Distorted and crude as it often was,
it was never positively illiterate. This surprised him.

"You--oh! you're not going yet!" He put his hand out, for the definite
way in which Nella-Rose turned was ominous. Already she seemed to belong
to the cabin room--to Truedale himself. Not a suggestion of strangeness
clung to her. It was as if she had always been there but that his eyes
had been holden.

"I must go!"

"Wait--oh! Nella-Rose. Let me walk part of the way with you. I--I have a
thousand things to say."

But she was gone out of the door, down the path.

Truedale stood and looked after her until the long shadows reached up to
Lone Dome's sharpest edge. White's dogs began nosing about, suggesting
attention to affairs nearer at hand. Then Truedale sighed as if waking
from a dream. He performed the duties Jim had left to his tender
mercy--the feeding of the animals, the piling up of wood. Then he forced
himself to take a long walk. He ate his evening meal late, and finally
sat down to his task of writing letters. He wrote six to Brace Kendall
and tore them up; he wrote one to his uncle and put it aside for
consideration when the effect of his day dreams left him sane enough to
judge it. Finally he managed a note to Dr. McPherson and one to Lynda
Kendall.

"I think"--so the letter to Lynda ran--"that I will work regularly, now,
on the play. With more blood in my own body I can hope to put more into
that. I'm going to get it out to-morrow and begin the infusion. I wish
you were here to-night--to see the wonderful effect of the moon on the
mists--but there! if I said more you might guess where I am. When I come
back I shall try to describe it and some day you must see it. Several
times lately I have imagined an existence here with one's work and
enough to subsist on. No worry, no nerve-racking, and always the
tremendous beauty to inspire one! Nothing seems wholly real here."

Then Truedale put down his pen. Nella-Rose crowded Lynda Kendall from
the field of vision; later, he