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“And you don’t call yourself a girl any longer!” I laughed.

“It’s always ‘girls’ and ‘men,'” she said. “If Cecil Harshaw is not a man now, he never will be.”

I didn’t know, I said, what the point at issue was between us. I thought Cecil Harshaw was very much a man, as men go, and I saw nothing, frankly, so very far amiss with his behavior.

“It’s very kind of you, Mrs. Daly, to defend him, I am sure. I suppose he could do no less than propose to me, after he had brought me out to marry a man who didn’t appear to be quite ready; and if it had to be done, it was best to do it quickly.”

So that was what she had been threshing out between whiles? I might have tried to answer her, but now the little tent among the willows began to glow with fire and candlelight, and a dark shape loomed against it. It was Cecil Harshaw, bareheaded, with an umbrella, coming to escort us in to supper.

I never saw such a pair of roses as Kitty wore in her cheeks that night, nor the girl herself in such a gale. Tom gave me a triumphant glance across the table, as if to say, See how the medicine works! It was either the beginning of the cure, or else it was a feverish reaction.

I shall have to hurry over our little incidents: how the wagon couldn’t go on by way of the shore, and had to flounder back over the rocks, and crawl out of the canon to the upper road; how Kitty and I set out vain-gloriously to walk to Broadlands by the river-trail, and Harshaw set out to walk with us; and how Kitty made it difficult for him to walk with both of us by staving on ahead, with the step of a young Atalanta. I was so provoked with her that I let her take her pace and I took mine. Fancy a woman of my age racing a girl of her build and constitution seven miles to Broadlands! Poor Harshaw was cruelly torn between us, but he manfully stuck to his duty. He would not abandon the old lady even for the pleasure of running after the young one, though I absolved him many times, and implored him to leave me to my fate. I take pride in recording his faithfulness, and I see now why I have always liked him. He wears well, particularly when things are most harassing.

It certainly was hard upon him when I gave out completely, toiling through the sand, and sat down to rest on the door-stone of a placer-miner’s cabin (cabin closed and miner gone), and nowhere through the hot, morning stillness could we catch a sound or a sight of the runaway. I could almost hear his heart beat, and his eyes and ears and all his keen young senses were on a stretch after that ridiculous girl. But he kept up a show of interest in my remarks, and paid every patient attention to my feeble wants, without an idea of how long it might be my pleasure to sit there. It was not long, however it may have seemed to him, before we heard wagon-wheels booming down a little side-canon between the hills. The team had managed to drag the wagon up through a scrubby gulch that looked like no thoroughfare, but which opened into a very fair way out of our difficulties.

When we had come within sight of Broadlands Ferry, all aboard except Kitty, and still not a sign nor a sound of her, our hearts began to soften toward that willful girl.

Tom requested Harshaw to jump out and see if he couldn’t round up his countrywoman. But Harshaw rather haughtily resigned–in favor of a better man, he said. Then Tom stood up in the wagon and gave the camp call, “Yee-ee-ip! yee-ip, ye-ip!” a brazen, barbarous hoot. Kitty clapped both hands to her ears when she was first introduced to it, but it did not fetch her now. Tom “yee-iped” again, and as we listened there she was, strolling toward us through the greasewood, with the face of a May morning! She wouldn’t give us the satisfaction of seeing her run, but her flushed cheeks, damp temples, and quick, sighing breath betrayed her. She had been running fast enough.