er her education.

As he looked at her, now, he for the first time fully realized her
beauty. He had known, from the first, that she was most attractive, most
unusual for a mountain maid; but now, laughing, although her head was
still bent to the book, her big eyes, sparkling with her merriment,
raised frankly to his face, were revelations to him. He had not seen
such eyes before, and all the old-time similes for deep-brown orbs
sprang instantly to mind. "Fathomless pools," "translucent amber"--no
simile would really describe them. Late hours had never dimmed them,
illness had never made them heavy, he was sure a lie had never made them
shift from their straight gaze for one short second. He had not seen
such eyes in cities!

And from careful contemplation of the eyes, he kept on with a careful
contemplation of the other beauties of his fair and unexpected pupil.
Her homespun gown, always ill-shaped and now unusually protuberant in
spots, unusually tight in others, because of its late wetting and
impromptu, partial drying, could not hide the sylvan grave of her
small-boned and lissome figure, just budding into womanhood. Her feet,
crossed on the ground, were as patrician in their nakedness as any
bluegrass belle's in satin slippers. Her ankles, scratched by casual
thorns and already beginning to blush brown from the June sun's ardent
kisses, were as delicate as any he had ever seen enmeshed in silken
hose. Her hands, long, slender, taper-fingered, actually dainty,
although brown and roughened by hard labor, were, it seemed to him,
better fitted for the fingering of a piano's keys than for the coarse
and heavy tasks to which he knew they must be well accustomed. He gazed
at her in veritable wonder. How had she blossomed, thus, here in this
wilderness?

"Where do you live?" he asked, interrupting their scholastic efforts.

"Up thar," she pointed, and, above, he could just see the top of a
mud-and-stick chimney rise above a crag between the trees.

"Have you brothers or sisters?"

"Ain't got nobody," she answered, and to her face there came a look of
keen resentment rather than of sorrow or of resignation. "I'm all th'
feud left," she said simply. She looked at Layson quickly, wondering if
he would be surprised that she should not have fought and also died.
"Girl cain't fight alone, much," she went on, in hurried explanation,
or, rather, quick excuse. "I might take a shot if I should git a chanst,
but I ain't had no