his eyes met hers, she drew back with an impatient
movement. .

"Ye look as if--as if ye thought I didn't get it honest," she exclaimed
petulantly, "but I did."

That drew his glance toward her dress again, for of course she referred
to that, and he could not help asking her a point-blank question.

"Where _did_ you get it?" he said.

There was a slow flippancy about the manner of her reply which annoyed
him by its variance with her beauty--but the beauty! How the moonlight
and the black and white brought it out as she leaned against the rock,
looking at him from under her lashes!

"Are ye goin' to tell the folks up at the house?" she demanded. "They
don't know nothin' and I don't want 'em to know."

He shrugged his shoulder negatively.

She laughed with a hint of cool slyness and triumph.

"I got it at Asheville," she said. "I went with father when they was a
show thar, 'n' the women stayed at the same tavern we was at, 'n' one
of 'em tuk up with me 'n' I done somethin' for her--carried a letter or
two," breaking into the sly, triumphant laugh again, "'n' she giv' me
the dress fur pay. What d'ye think of it? Is it becomin'?"

The suddenness of the change of manner with which she said these last
words was indescribable. She stood upright, her head up, her hands
fallen at her sides, her eyes cool and straight--her whole presence
confronting him with the power of which she was conscious.

"Is it?" she repeated.

He was a gentleman from instinct and from training, having ordinarily
quite a lofty repugnance for all profanity and brusqueness, and yet some
how,--account for it as you will,--he had the next instant answered her
with positive brutality.

"Yes," he answered, "Damnably!"

When the words were spoken and he heard their sound fall upon the soft
night air, he was as keenly disgusted as he would have been if he had
heard them uttered by another man. It was not until afterward when he
had had leisure to think the matter over that he comprehended vaguely
the force which had moved him.

But his companion received them without discomfiture. Indeed, it really
occurred to him at the moment that there was a possibility that she
would have been less pleased with an expression more choice.

"I come down here to-night," she said, "because I never git no chance
to do nothin' up at the house. I'm not a-goin' to let _them_ know. Never
mind why, but ye mustn't tell 'em."

He felt haughtily anxious to get back t