little smile and said, "Are you sorry?"

He came to himself with a start and sat down on the tree-trunk beside
her. "Sorry? You know better than that. But I do believe I'm a bit
idiotic with happiness. Are you quite sure you know what you have done?"

"Quite. I think I made up my mind last night to do it--if you should ask
me. It was after our ride on the engine; after my father had let me see
what was in his mind."

"Ah, yes--your father. He will be very angry, won't he?"

"Yes"--reluctantly.

"But you will not let him make you recant?"

She laughed joyously. "You think you are in love with me, and yet that
shows how little you really know of me, or of the family
characteristics. We have plenty of unlovelinesses, but fickleness isn't
one of them."

"Forgive me," he said, humbly; "but it seems to me there is so little to
hold you, and so much to turn you aside. I----"

A series of shrill shrieks from the locomotive in the valley below
interrupted him, and he rose reluctantly. "They're calling us in; we'll
have to go."

She took his arm and they ran down the steep declivity, across the small
plateau, and so on to the bottom of the railway cutting. Just before
they reached the train, Brockway asked if he should tell the Burtons.

"As you please," she replied. "I shall tell my father and Cousin
Jeannette as soon as we get back."

They found the passengers all aboard and the train waiting for them, and
Mrs. Burton scolded them roundly for their misdeeds.

"We had a mind to go off and leave you," she said; "it would have served
you right for running away. Where ever have you been?"

"Up on the hill, taking in the scenery," Brockway replied; and Gertrude
abetted him with an enthusiastic description of Gray's Peak as seen from
the plateau--a description which ran on without a break until the train
paused at Silver Plume, where the Tadmorians debarked to burrow in a
silver mine. Burton burrowed with them, as a matter of course, but his
wife declined to go.

"I shall stay right here and keep an eye on these truants," she
declared, with great severity. And Brockway and Gertrude exchanged
comforting glances--as who should say, "What matters it now?"--and
clasped hands under cover of the stir of debarkation. And Mrs. Burton
saw all this without seeming to, and rejoiced gleefully at the bottom of
her match-making heart.

When the Tadmorians had inspected the mine, and had come back muddy and
besprinkled with water