" she gasped. "I am _not_ a child, Signor!"

Signor . . . The word waked some echo in his mind. . . . The child had
used it before--but what connection was groping----?

He repeated the word aloud.

"You do not recall?" said Maria Angelina chokingly. "Though indeed,
there is no reason why you should. It was but for a moment----"

She glanced up to see recognition leap amazedly into his face.

"The little Signorina! The Blairs' little Signorina!"

"Maria Angelina Santonini," she told him soberly. "Yes, that is I."

"Why of course I remember," he insisted. "A little girl in a white
dress. A big hat which you took off. Your first night in America. We had
a wonderful dance together----"

"And you said you would come to the mountains," she told him childishly.

He stared a moment. "Why, so I did. . . . And here I am. And here you
are. To think I did not know you--I've been wondering whom you made me
want to think of! But I took you for a youngster, you know, a regular
ten-year-old runaway. Why, with your hair down like that---- Of course,
it was absurd of me."

He paused with a smile for the absurdity of it.

Gallantly she tried to give him back that smile but there was something
so wan and piteous in the curve of her soft lips, something so hurt and
sick in the shadows of her dark eyes, that Barry Elder felt oddly
silenced.

And then he tried to cover that silence with kind chatter as he moved
about his room once more in hospitable preparation.

"It was Sandy, here, who really found you," he told her. "He whined at
the door till I let him out and then he came back, barking, for me, so I
had to go. I was really looking for a mink. Sandy's always excited about
minks."

Maria Angelina put a hand to the dog's head and stroked it.

"I was so tired," she said. "I think I was asleep."

"I rather think you were," said Barry in an odd tone. He glanced at her
white cheek with its scarlet scratch of a branch. "And I rather think
you ought to be asleep now but first you must eat this and drink some
more coffee."

Maria Angelina needed no urging. Like a starveling she fell upon that
plate of crisp bacon and delicately fried eggs and cleaned it to the
last morsel.

"I had but two bites of sweet chocolate for my dinner," she apologized.

"So you were lost before dinner--no wonder you were done in."

Barry filled a very worn-looking little brown pipe with care. "Where
were you going, anyway, for your picnic?"

"It