put up on that tract; and if I make a move toward it with the rough lumber, perhaps Uncle Don will open his pocketbook to help with improvements. I've got to convince him first, however, that I am not leading the life of a sybarite out here."

"Your Uncle Don will come out at once to dissuade you, if he finds you really adopting this wholesale manner of settling down," prophesied Miss Lottie, sagely; "and I really do not know what I should do without you in town next winter.

"Adopt Saxel," he suggested; and Dinah's eyes fairly sparkled with mischief as she saw Miss Lottie's cloak of coolness swiftly settling over the gentle little face. "Or Mr. March," added Don; and then the sparkling brown eyes were turned from her aunt for one quick upward glance at him.

"Mr. March is really a very nice person," agreed Miss Lottie. "I enjoyed his society very much, or could have if Dinah had only treated him a little nicer; she was always contrary with him; but pleasant as he was to me, you know, Don, he is not you."

"Lucky fellow!" agreed Donald. "He is just the style of a man I like, but have never flattered by imitation; the sort that has so definite an object in life that no counter attraction ever swerves him-neither love, nor marriage, nor the songs of sirens. Do you fancy he will ever get lazy long enough to think of matrimony, Dinah?"

"I have not asked him," she returned, with the daintiest flush of light creeping over her cheeks; "but I can after January 1st, if you are curious. It will be leap-year then." "And he will have ample time to be wooed and married and all before that time. But how comes on that picture of yours, your blonde Adonis?-or is it a Vulcan of the Ligonier?"

"Oh, it is a Vulcan only sketched in. I am yet striving for the 'tone' of the composition. The moment I laid eyes on that forge, with its grim surroundings, I gave up all idea of a simple head. I must have something more comprehensive a full figure, with the background of the smoked rock; a bit of fire gleaming from the cleft where the forge is, and the head of a horse thrust under the laurel at the entrance watching the blonde Vulcan making a shoe. How is that, eh? I have made three sketches—one that day we were there. When I decide just which one to use, I will go over with you again, and watch him at work. Just by accident, you know, a model will drop unconsciously sometimes into the very pose you have been hunting for."

"Yes;" and Don stroked thoughtfully the brown of a rather fine mustache, and looked across the easel at her, instead of at the stretch of canvas dotted with chalk-lines and meaningless hieroglyphics. "But see here, Dinah, have you stopped to think that these people are not used to being posed for studies, and do not in the least understand your altogether impersonal attitude toward them? You see you look on a model of the genus homo much as you would on a plaster cast, but-but-Aunt Lottie, why do you not convince her how much too pretty she is for her masculine models to reciprocate?"

"Auntie as a chaperone vanishes when art is in question," laughed Dinah; "but what has put those ideas in your mind? Are you afraid Vulcan will be impressed to his own injury? I guess not. He has a wife, you know, for protection; and I can't allow your scruples to interfere with my composition. What matters the opinion of these people? Thank heaven, they are not my judges."

'Well, I have spoken. I say no more; only if you speak to some of them for ten minutes in that gracious way you

can assume, you are likely to have some extra lovers, and I, perhaps, some duels to fight."

"Assume! As if I were never by any chance gracious naturally."

"Master the science of animal magnetism as explained in that book you got," advised Mr. Floyd, slyly, "then you can compel those erratic tendencies of hers to reason, whether she will or no."

"Animal magnetism! What new fad will you adopt next, Don? In the name of sense, why are you studying up questions of that sort?"

"Only a late desire to accumulate knowledge," he answered, airily, and retreated before the shower of questions Miss Dinah proceeded to launch at him.

"Don is actually getting 'queer' from living so much among those people on the other mountain," she complained. "Do you not think, Papa, it is time to write Donald Senior that the settling down he advocated has been followed up to a degree alarming? For if this state of mind continues, Don will settle so fast in the mire of the glades or the charms of the mountain that he never will go back to civilization. And is he really reading up questions of magnetism?"

"Oh, not very seriously, I guess; but something has aroused his interest in the so-called mystery of fascination, and I simply referred him to a work on animal magnetism in explanation; he wanted it for some friend, I fancy."

"He hasn't any reading friends about here except Mr. Winston. Now whom could he want it for?"

"Well, well, what matter? I do wish, Dinah, you would cultivate something besides the art of asking questions." And the old gentleman testily gathered up some papers he was trying to read and betook himself upstairs.

"So am I always excluded from the bosom of my family."

yawned Dinah. "Now Auntie, dear, you at least might say something nice to me, as a brace to keep me from falling asleep."

"Yes, to be sure," agreed Miss Lottie, rousing from the edge of a nap just long enough to say so. "This is a sleepy sort of a day." And Miss Dinah collapsed, and in a sort of despair picked up brushes and paints and went to work.

"But I vow I am going with Don in future on those reconstruction quests of his," she decided, recklessly. "He escapes the dull sameness of life in a country boardinghouse, anyway."

CHAPTER VIII

"I'M JEST KRIN—KRIN LE FEVRE.”

But the days swung around for a week before the weather and the will of man made her vow possible, and even then it was the most prosaic of prospects -a ride around the road to the edge of the valley, where Riker lived.

"But I will go, even if I wade through clay and don't see a tree," she decided; "though I did hope you would go over the mountain."

"Some day I may, if you will wait."

"Which I will not. I will ride over all the ugly township roads in the district rather than stay in the house another day; and then I might get a look at Daphne. Does she live in this direction?"

"Can you imagine Daphne living on a township road?" he laughed.

He was growing elusive as Dinah herself those days; and the deprecating uncertainty with which he had com

menced his settlement in the hills was giving way to an open-eyed confidence that was contagious.

"That young Edson's been sort o' layin' low around here till he got the lay o' the land, an' now he's peggin' into work an' raisin' hell on the mountain," was the grim summing up of his achievements by one of his tenants.

And the tenants took more kindly than at first to the innovations he was bringing in; a sort of awakened faith in himself was having its effect on them through some reflected light. They did not sneer so much at his white hands since they found the fingers could grip like steel, and through a revulsion of feeling that day at Riker's, they accorded him a place in their minds beside the minister, yet liked him better than that gentleman, simply because no restraint of duty to the cloth kept them sanctimonious in his presence.

Why they should assign him that semi-clerical character was a puzzle that met him first in the woods that night, but of which he had seen undeniable glimpses in the manner of the mountaineers ever since. All warmed toward him a little by that spark of sympathy that had touched him that morning, and that he had been able to express through the music. Such a subtle little thing to change a life! And Dinah, noting only the effects, and wholly ignorant of the cause, wondered a little, and watched him curiously, and decided that life on the mountain was making him queer.

"And is there never a Daphne in this part of the valley?" she queried. "Somewhere here it must have been that you found her. I am going to hunt her up, in order to have an object in life."

"You will not find her," he smiled, confidently. "Is not the home for Daphne in the laurel? And the laurel does not grow in plowed fields."

But, nevertheless, Miss Dinah kept her bright, cynical