recumbent position at a
respectful distance from the little figure.

"There, isn't it nice?"

"Yes, Miss Mayfield."

"But, perhaps," said Miss Mayfield, now that she had him down, "perhaps
you too have got something to do. Dear me! I'm like that naughty boy in
the story-book, who went round to all the animals, in turn, asking them
to play with him. He could only find the butterfly who had nothing to
do. I don't wonder he was disgusted. I hate butterflies."

Love clarifies the intellect! Jeff, astonished at himself, burst out,
"Why, look yer, Miss Mayfield, the butterfly only hez a day or two
to--to--to live and--be happy!"

Miss Mayfield crossed her knees again, and instantly, after the sublime
fashion of her sex, scattered his intellect by a swift transition from
the abstract to the concrete. "But you're not a butterfly, Mr. Jeff.
You're always doing something. You've been hunting."

"No-o!" said Jeff, scarlet, as he thought of his gun in pawn at the
"Summit."

"But you do hunt; I know it."

"How?"

"You shot those quail for me the morning after I came. I heard you go
out--early--very early."

"Why, you allowed you slept so well that night, Miss Mayfield."

"Yes; but there's a kind of delicious half-sleep that sick people have
sometimes, when they know and are gratefully conscious that other people
are doing things for them, and it makes them rest all the sweeter."

There was a dead silence. Jeff, thrilling all over, dared not say
anything to dispel his delicious dream. Miss Mayfield, alarmed at his
readiness with the butterfly illustration, stopped short. They both
looked at the prospect, at the distant "Summit Hotel"--a mere snow-drift
on the mountain--at the clear sunlight on the barren plateau, at the
bleak, uncompromising "Half-way House," and said nothing.

"I ought to be very grateful," at last began Miss Mayfield, in quite
another voice, and a suggestion that she was now approaching real and
profitable conversation, "that I'm so much better. This mountain air has
been like balm to me. I feel I am growing stronger day by day. I do not
wonder that you are so healthy and so strong as you are, Mr. Jeff."

Jeff, who really did not know before that he was so healthy,
apologetically admitted the fact. At the same time, he was miserably
conscious that Miss Mayfield's condition, despite her ill health, was
very superior to his own.

"A month ago," she continued reflectively, "my mother would never ha