"Will you do a galop with me presently?--if you don't get a better partner, I mean," said Master Thayne.

"That wouldn't be much of a promise," answered Leslie, smiling. "I will, at any rate; that is, if--after I've spoken to Mrs. Linceford."

Mr. Wharne came up and said something to young Thayne, just then; and the latter turned eagerly to Leslie. "The telescope's fixed, out on the balcony; and you can see Jupiter and three of his moons! We must make haste, before _our_ moon's up."

"Will you go and look, Mrs. Linceford?" asked Mr. Wharne of the lady, as Leslie reached her side.

They went with him, and Master Thayne followed. Jeannie and Elinor and the Miss Th.o.r.esbys were doing the inevitable promenade after the dance,--under difficulties.

"Who is your young friend?" inquired Mrs. Linceford, with a shade of doubt in her whisper, as they came out on the balcony.

"Master"--Leslie began to introduce, but stopped. The name, which she had not been quite certain of, escaped her.

"My name is Dakie Thayne," said the boy, with a bow to the matron.

"Now, Mrs. Linceford, if you'll just sit here," said Mr. Wharne, placing a chair. "I suppose I ought to have come to you first; but it's all right," he added, in a low tone, over her shoulder. "He's a nice boy."

And Mrs. Linceford put her eye to the telescope. "Dakie Thayne! It's a queer name; and yet it seems as if I had heard it before," she said, looking away through the mystic tube into s.p.a.ce, and seeing Jupiter with his moons, in a fair round picture framed expressly to her eye; yet sending a thought, at the same time, up and down the lists of a mental directory, trying to place Dakie Thayne among people she had heard of.

"I'll be responsible for the name," answered Marmaduke Wharne.

"'Dakie' is a nickname, of course; but they always call me so, and I like it best," the boy was explaining to Leslie, while they waited in the doorway.

Then her turn came. Leslie had never looked through a telescope upon the stars before. She forgot the galop, and the piano tinkled out its gayest notes unheard. "It seems like coming all the way back," she said, when she moved away for Dakie Thayne.

Then they wheeled the telescope upon its pivot eastward, and met our own moon coming up, as if in a grand jealousy, to a.s.sert herself within her small domain, and put out faint, far satellites of lordlier planets.

They looked upon her mystic, glistening hill-tops, and down her awful craters; and from these they seemed to drop a little, as a bird might, and alight on the earth-mountains looming close at hand, with their huge, rough crests and sides, and sheer escarpments white with nakedness; and so--got home again. Leslie, with her maps and gazetteer, had done no traveling like this.

She would not have cared, if she had known, that Imogen Th.o.r.esby was looking for her within, to present, at his own request, the cavalry captain. She did not know in the least, absorbed in her pure enjoyment, that Marmaduke Wharne was deliberately trying her, and confirming his estimate of her, in these very things.

She danced her galop with Dakie Thayne, after she went back. The cavalry captain was introduced, and asked for it. "That was something," as Hans Andersen would say; but "What a goose not to have managed better!" was what Imogen Th.o.r.esby thought concerning it, as the gold bars turned themselves away.

Leslie Goldthwaite had taken what came to her, and she had had an innocent, merry time; she had been glad to be dressed nicely, and to look her best: but somehow she had not thought of that much, after all; the old uncomfortableness had not troubled her to-night.

"_Just to be in better business_. That's the whole of it," she thought to herself, with her head upon the pillow. She put it in words, mentally, in the same off-hand fashion in which she would have spoken it to Cousin Delight. "One must look out for that, and keep at it.

_That's_ the eye-stone-woman's way; and it's what has kept me from worrying and despising myself to-night. It only happened so, this time; it was Mr. Wharne, not I. But I suppose one can always find something, by trying. And the trying"--The rest wandered off into a happy musing; and the musing merged into a dream.

Object and motive,--the "seeking first;" she had touched upon that, at last, with a little comprehension of its working.

She liked Dakie Thayne. The next day they saw a good deal of him; he joined himself gradually, but not obtrusively, to their party; they included him in their morning game of croquet. This was at her instance; he was standing aside, not expecting to be counted in, though he had broken off his game of solitaire, and driven the b.a.l.l.s up to the starting-stake, as they came out upon the ground. The Th.o.r.esby set had ignored him, always, being too many already among themselves,--and he was only a boy.

This morning there were only Imogen, and Etty, the youngest; a walking-party had gone off up the Cherry Mountain road, and Ginevra was upstairs, packing; for the Th.o.r.esbys had also suddenly decided to leave for Outledge on the morrow. Mrs. Th.o.r.esby declared, in confidence, to Mrs. Linceford, that "old Wharne would make any house intolerable; and that Jefferson, at any rate, was no place for more than a week's stay."

She "wouldn't have it mentioned in the house, however, that she was going, till the time came,--it made such an ado; and everybody's plans were at loose ends among the mountains, ready to fix themselves to anything at a day's notice; they might have tomorrow's stage loaded to crushing, if they did not take care."

"But I thought Mrs. Devreaux and the Klines were with you," remarked Mrs. Linceford.

"Of our party? Oh, no indeed; we only fell in with them here."

"Fell in" with them; became inseparable for a week; and now were stealing a march,--_dodging_ them,--lest there might be an overcrowding of the stage, and an impossibility of getting outside seats! Mrs.

Th.o.r.esby was a woman of an imposing elegance and dignity, with her large curls of resplendent gray hair high up on her temples, her severely-handsome dark eyebrows, and her own perfect, white teeth; yet she could do a shabby thing, you see,--a thing made shabby by its motive. The Devreaux and Klines were only "floating people," boarding about,--not permanently valuable as acquaintances; well enough to know when one met them,--that was all. Mrs. Th.o.r.esby had daughters; she was obliged to calculate as to what was worth while. Mrs. Linceford had an elegant establishment in New York; she had young sisters to bring out; there was suitability here; and the girls would naturally find themselves happy together.

Dakie Thayne developed brilliantly at croquet. He and Leslie, with Etty Th.o.r.esby, against Imogen and the Haddens, swept triumphantly around the course, and came in to the stake, before there had been even a "rover"

upon the other side. Except, indeed, as they were _sent_ roving, away off over the bank and down the road, from the sloping, uneven ground,--the most extraordinary field, in truth, on which croquet was ever attempted. But then you cannot expect a level, velvet lawn on the side of a mountain.

"Children always get the best of it at croquet,--when they know anything at all," said Imogen Th.o.r.esby discontentedly, throwing down her mallet.

"You 'poked' awfully, Etty."

Etty began an indignant denial; unable to endure the double accusation of being a child,--she, a girl in her fourteenth year,--and of "poking."

But Imogen walked away quite unconcernedly, and Jeannie Hadden followed her. These two, as nearest in age, were growing intimate. Ginevra was almost too old,--she was twenty.

They played a four-ball game then; Leslie and Etty against Elinor and Dakie Thayne. But Elinor declared--laughing, all the same, in her imperturbably good-natured way--that not only Etty's pokes were against her, but that Dakie would _not_ croquet Leslie's ball downhill. Nothing ever really put Elinor Hadden out, the girls said of her, except when her hair wouldn't go up; and then it was funny to see her. It was a sunbeam in a snarl, or a snow flurry out of a blue sky. This in parenthesis, however; it was quite true, as she alleged, that Dakie Thayne had taken up already that chivalrous att.i.tude toward Leslie Goldthwaite which would not let him act otherwise than as her loyal knight, even though opposed to her at croquet.

"You'll have enough of that boy," said Mrs. Linceford, when Leslie came in, and found her at her window that overlooked the wickets. "There's nothing like a masculine creature of that age for adoring and monopolizing a girl two or three years older. He'll make you mend his gloves, and he'll beg your hair-ribbons for hat-strings; and when you're not dancing or playing croquet with him, he'll be after you with some boy-hobby or other, wanting you to sympathize and help. 'I know their tricks and their manners.'" But she looked amused and kind while she threatened, and Leslie only smiled back and said nothing.

Presently fresh fun gathered in Mrs. Linceford's eyes. "You're making queer friends, child, do you know, at the beginning of your travels? We shall have c.o.c.ky-locky, and Turkey-lurky, and Goosie-poosie, and all the rest of them, before we get much farther. Don't breathe a word, girls,"

she went on, turning toward them all, and br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with merriment and mischief;--"but there's the best joke brewing. It's just like a farce. Is the door shut, Elinor? And are the Th.o.r.esbys gone upstairs?

They're going with us, you know? And there's nothing to be said about it? And it's partly to get away from Marmaduke Wharne? Well, _he_'s going, too. And it's greatly because they're spoiling the place for him here. He thinks he'll try Outledge; and there's nothing to be said about that, either! And I'm the unhappy depositary of all their complaints and secrets. And if n.o.body's stopped, they'll all be off in the stage with us to-morrow morning! I couldn't help telling you, for it was too good to keep."

The secrets were secrets through the day; and Mrs. Linceford had her quiet fun, and opportunity for her demure teasing.

"How long since Outledge was discovered and settled?--by the moderns, I mean," said Mr. Wharne. "What chance will one really have of quiet there?"

"Well, really, to be honest, Mr. Wharne, I'm afraid Outledge will be just at the rampant stage this summer. It's the second year of anything like general accommodation, and everybody has just heard of it, and it's the knowing and stylish thing to go there. For a week or two it may be quiet; but then there'll be a jam. There'll be hops, and tableaux, and theatricals, of course; interspersed with 'picnicking at the tomb of Jehoshaphat,' or whatever mountain solemnity stands for that. It'll be human nature right over again, be a.s.sured, Mr. Wharne."

Yet, somehow, Mr. Wharne would not be frightened from his determination,--until the evening; when plans came out, and good-bys and wonders and lamentations began.

"Yes, we have decided quite suddenly; the girls want to see Outledge, and there's a pleasant party of friends, you know,--one can't always have that. We shall probably fill a stage: so they will take us through, instead of dropping us at the Crawford House." In this manner Mrs.

Th.o.r.esby explained to her dear friend, Mrs. Devreaux.

"We shall be quite sorry to lose you all. But it would only have been a day or so longer, at any rate. Our rooms are engaged for the fifteenth, at Saratoga; we've very little time left for the mountains, and it wouldn't be worth while to go off the regular track. We shall probably go down to the Profile on Sat.u.r.day."

And then--_da capo_--"Jefferson was no place really to _stay_ at; you got the whole in the first minute," etc., etc.

"Good-night, Mrs. Linceford. I'm going up to unpack my valise and make myself comfortable again. All things come round, or go by, I find, if one only keeps one's self quiet. But I shall look in upon you at Outledge yet." These were the stairway words of Marmaduke Wharne to-night.

"'One gets the whole in the first minute'! How can they keep saying that? Look, Elinor, and see if you can tell me where we are?" was Leslie's cry, as, early next morning, she drew up her window-shade, to look forth--on what?

Last night had lain there, underneath them, the great basin between Starr King, behind, and the roots of that lesser range, far down, above which the blue Lafayette uprears itself: an enormous valley, filled with evergreen forest, over whose tall pines and cedars one looked, as if they were but juniper and blueberry bushes; far up above whose heads the real average of the vast mountain-country heaped itself in swelling ma.s.ses,--miles and miles of beetling height and solid breadth. This morning it was gone; only the great peaks showed themselves, as a far-off, cliff-bound sh.o.r.e, or here and there a green island in a vast, vaporous lake. The night-chill had come down among the heights, condensing the warm exhalations of the valley-bosom that had been shone into all day yesterday by the long summer sun; till, when he lifted himself once more out of the east, sending his leaping light from crest to crest, white fallen clouds were tumbling and wreathing themselves about the knees and against the mighty bosoms of the giants, and at their feet the forest was a sea.

"We must dress, and we must look!" exclaimed Leslie, as the early summons came for them. "Oh dear! oh dear! if we were only like the birds! or if all this would wait till we get down!"

"Please drop the shade just a minute, Les. This gla.s.s is in such a horrid light! I don't seem to have but half a face, and I can't tell which is the up-side of that! And--oh dear! I've no _time_ to get into a fuss!" Elinor had not disdained the beauty and wonder without; but it was, after all, necessary to be dressed, and in a given time; and a bad light for a looking-gla.s.s is such a disastrous thing!

"I've brushed out half my crimps," she said, again; "and my ruffle is basted in wrong side out, and altogether I'm got up _a la furieuse_!"

But she laughed before she had done scolding, catching sight of her own exaggerated little frown in the distorting gla.s.s, that was unable, with all its malice, to spoil the bright young face when it came to smiles and dimples.

And then Jeannie came knocking at the door. They had spare minutes, after all, and the mists were yet tossing in the valley when they went down. They were growing filmy, and floating away in shining fragments up over the shoulders of the hills, and the lake was lower and less, and the emerging green was like the "Thousand Islands."

They waited a little there, in the wide, open door together, and looked out upon it; and then the Haddens went round into their sister's room, and Leslie was left alone in the rare, sweet, early air. The secret joy came whispering at her heart again: that there was all this in the world, and that one need not be utterly dull and mean, and dead to it; that something in her answered to the greatness overshadowing her; that it was possible, sometimes, and that people did reach out into a larger life than that of self and every-day. How else did the great mountains draw them to themselves so? But then she would not always be among the mountains.