e two beasts settled themselves to their
places with a wontedness that assured Thryng they would be perfectly
manageable under her hand.

David turned to the child, relieved him of the basket, which was heavy
with unusual weight, and would have lifted him up, but Hoyle eluded his
grasp, and, scrambling over the wheel with catlike agility, slipped
shyly into his place close to the girl's side. Then, with more than
childlike thoughtfulness, the boy looked up into her face and said in a
low voice:--

"The gen'l'man's things is ovah yandah by the track, Cass. He cyant tote
'em alone, I reckon. Whar is he goin'?"

Then Thryng remembered himself and his needs. He looked at the line of
track curving away up the mountain side in one direction, and in the
other lost in a deep cut in the hills; at the steep red banks rising
high on each side, arched over by leafy forest growth, with all the
interlacing branches and smallest twigs bearing their delicate burden of
white, feathery snow. He caught his breath as a sense of the strange,
untamed beauty, marvellous and utterly lonely, struck upon him. Beyond
the tracks, high up on the mountain slope, he thought he spied,
well-nigh hid from sight by the pines, the gambrel roof of a large
building--or was it a snow-covered rock?

"Is that a house up there?" he asked, turning to the girl, who sat
leaning forward and looking steadily down at him.

"That is the hotel."

"A road must lead to it, then. If I could get up there, I could send
down for my things."

"They is no one thar," piped the boy; and Thryng remembered the
brakeman's words, and how he had rebelled at the thought of a hotel
incongruously set amid this primeval beauty; but now he longed for the
comfort of a warm room and tea at a hospitable table. He wished he had
accepted the bishop's invitation. It was a predicament to be dropped in
this wild spot, without a store, a cabin, or even a thread of blue smoke
to be seen as indicating a human habitation, and no soul near save these
two children.

The sun was sinking toward the western hilltops, and a chillness began
creeping about him as the shadows lengthened across the base of the
mountain, leaving only the heights in the glowing light.

"Really, you know, I can't say what I am to do. I'm a stranger here--"

It seemed odd to him at the moment, but her face, framed in the huge
sunbonnet,--a delicate flower set in a rough calyx,--suddenly lost all
expression. She did no