gly. She would, he thought, be wondrous
beautiful if given the accessories which girls more fortunate had at
their hand. Beautiful, she was, undoubtedly, without them; with them she
would be--he almost caught his breath at thought of it--sensational!

Mentally he ran over all the girls he knew in a swift survey of memory.
Not one of them, he thought, could really compare with her. Even Barbara
Holton, with her haughty, big featured, strikingly handsome face,
although she had attracted him in days passed, seemed singularly
unattractive to him, now.

While he sat, musing thus, almost forgetful of the puzzling ABC, she
gazed off across the valley dreamily, the ABC's as far from her. It was
a lovely prospect of bare crag and wooded slope, green fields and
low-hung clouds, with, at its center, here and there the silver of the
stream which, back among the forest trees, supplied the water to the
hidden pool where she had watched him, furtively, the first time she had
ever seen him. But it was not of the fair prospect that the girl was
thinking. The coming of the stranger had brought into her life a hundred
new emotions, ten thousand puzzling guesses at the life which lay beyond
and could produce such men as he. Were all men in the bluegrass like
Frank Layson--courteous, considerate, and as strong and active as the
best of mountaineers? If so--what a splendid place for women! She was
sure that men like him were never brutal to their wives and daughters,
sisters, mothers, as the mountaineers too often are; she was certain
that they did not craze themselves with whisky and terrify and beat
their families; she was sure that when one loved a girl the courtship
must be all sweet gentleness and happiness and joy, not like the quick
succession of mad love-making and fierce quarrels which had
characterized the heart-affairs that she had watched, there in the
mountains.

She, herself, had had no love-affairs. Instinctively she had held
herself aloof from the ruck of the young mountain-men, neither she nor
they knew why, unless it was because she owned the valley land and so
was what the mountain folk called rich. Most of them had tried to pay
her court, but none of them, save Joe, had in the least attracted her,
and she had let them know this (strangely) without arousing too much
anger.

Now she had one suitor, only, who was at all persistent--Joe. She had
sometimes thought she loved him. Now she knew, quite certainly, that she
did