When I saw it
at that window"--she pointed across the room--"I certainly thought my
eyes were closed and that--it had come--the kind, good face that saved
me!" A sweet, friendly smile wreathed the girl's lips and she rose with
rare dignity and held out her thin, delicate hand:
"Mister Outlander, we're going to be neighbours, aren't we?"
"Yes--neighbours!" Truedale took the hand with a distinct sense of
suffocation, "but why do you call me an outlander?"
"Because--you are! You're not _of_ our mountains."
"No, I wish I were!"
"Wishing can't make you. You are--or you aren't."
Truedale noted the girl's language. Distorted and crude as it often was,
it was never positively illiterate. This surprised him.
"You--oh! you're not going yet!" He put his hand out, for the definite
way in which Nella-Rose turned was ominous. Already she seemed to belong
to the cabin room--to Truedale himself. Not a suggestion of strangeness
clung to her. It was as if she had always been there but that his eyes
had been holden.
"I must go!"
"Wait--oh! Nella-Rose. Let me walk part of the way with you. I--I have a
thousand things to say."
But she was gone out of the door, down the path.
Truedale stood and looked after her until the long shadows reached up to
Lone Dome's sharpest edge. White's dogs began nosing about, suggesting
attention to affairs nearer at hand.
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