up its toes for a climb.

CHAPTER VII

THE PINNACLE

It was an exciting situation.

Pemrose, who like the enthroned daredevil liked excitement, if she was
warm enough to enjoy it, had not hoped for quite such a tidbit when she
came to the mountains,--at least, short of the little Thunder Bird's
record-breaking flight.

"Oh! I did so want to run across him again. I do so long to thank him!
Why--why! we might never have escaped from that awful wreck, got out of
the zero water, but for him, Una." The blue eyes were wet now, frankly
wet, bluebells by a mountain brook--the little bursting brooklet of
feeling within.

"I--I'd like to thank him, too!" gushed Una, with that little fixed star
twinkling most radiantly in one dark eye, the slight stand which
characterized it only at intense moments when feeling reached indefinite
altitudes. "Oh! how glad I am now," she ran on breathlessly, "that we
made Andrew leave the car down in a garage at the Pinnacle's foot and
bring us up here for a sort of picnic supper," sending a sidelong glance
scouting round for the tall, capped figure of the grizzled chauffeur
who, a brief ten years before, had been driving his "laird's" car upon
Ben Muir, a heathery mountain of his native Highlands.

Trustworthy as day, a capable driver and zealous Church Elder, he was
one to whose guardianship Una Grosvenor, the apple of her parents' eye,
might safely be intrusted with her visiting friend while her father
golfed and her mother lunched and played bridge in complacent peace of
mind.

"Oh! she's all right with Andrew; he's such a true-penny!" was her
father's dictum. "Safer with him, up here, than she would be with maid
or housekeeper! And, after that shock in the winter, the doctor wants
her to be out of doors among the hills morning, noon and
night--practically all the time, if she can!"

Ah! so far, so good. But just at this unprecedented moment of excitement
Andrew, the true-penny, had encountered another Scot, who emigrated
before he did, and was breezily "clacking" with him at some distance
from where two breathlessly expectant girls gazed down upon the black
top of the nickum's head--and at his wheeling shoulders in the great
armchair.

"Oh--oh! there he goes--see--curling up his legs, drawing up his feet
carefully, turning in the seat--standing up!" cried Pemrose, all Rose at
this crisis, prematurely blooming, as if it were June, not May, as she
stood on tiptoe to meet a