“He’s not a man.  He’s just a big, handsome, sulky kid.  When he’s cross he pulls his eyebrows together so there’s a little lump between them.  You want to pinch it.  And when he smiles he’s got the sweetest expression around his mouth, Kate!  As if he was just so full of the old nick he couldn’t behave if he tried.  You know—­little quirky creases at the corners, and a twinkle in his eyes—­oh, good night!  He’s just so good looking, honestly, it’s a sin.  But his disposition is spoiled.  He gets awfully grouchy over the least little thing—­”

“Marion, how old is he?” Kate had been holding her hair away from her face and staring all the while with shocked eyes at Marion.

“Oh, I don’t know—­old enough to drive a girl perfectly crazy if he smiled at her often enough.  Do you want to go up and meet him?  He’d like you, Kate—­you’re so superior.  He simply can’t stand me, I’m such a mental lightweight.  His eyes keep saying, ’So young and lovely, and—­nobody home,’ when he looks at me.  You go, Kate.  Take him up a loaf of bread; that he had brought from town tastes sour.”

“Marion, I don’t believe a word you’re saying!  I can tell by your eyes when you’re trying to throw me off the track.  But old or young, handsome or ugly, it was a dreadful thing for you to spend the night up there, alone with a strange man.  I simply walked the floor all night, worrying about you!  I’d have gone up there in spite of the altitude, if the fire had not been between.  I only hope Fred and the professor don’t get to hear of it.  I was so afraid they would reach home before you did!  But since they didn’t, there’s no need of saying anything about it.  They left right away, before any of us had gotten anxious about you.  If the man who told me doesn’t blurt it to every one he sees—­what in the world possessed you, Marion, to phone down to the Forest Service that you were up there and going to stay?”

“Well, forevermore!” Marion lifted her head from her arm to stare at Kate.  Then she laughed and lay back luxuriously.  “I was afraid you wouldn’t know where to look for the bread,” she explained meekly, and turned her face away from the sunlight and took a nap.

Kate finished with her hair rather abruptly, considering the leisurely manner in which she had been brushing it.  She glanced often at Marion sprawled gracefully and unconventionally in the hammock with one cinder-blackened boot sticking boyishly out over the edge.  Kate’s eyes held an expression of baffled curiosity.  They often held that expression when she looked at Marion.

But presently the professor came, dragging his feet wearily and mopping his soot-blackened face with a handkerchief as black.  He gave the hammock a longing look, as though he had been counting on easing his aching body into it.  Seeing Marion there asleep, he dropped to the pine needle carpet under a great tree, and began to fan himself with his stiff-brimmed straw hat that was grimed with smoke and torn by branches.