"I? You think I laugh a good deal? Good Lord! Some folk think I don't
laugh enough." He had his friends back home in mind, and somehow the
memory steadied him for an instant.

"P'r'aps they-all don't know you as well as I do." This with amusing
conviction.

"Perhaps they don't." Truedale was deadly solemn. "But go on,
Nella-Rose. I promise not to laugh now."

"It was the beginning of--you!" The girl turned her eyes to the
fire--she was quaintly demure. "At first when I saw you looking in that
window, yonder, I was right scared."

Jim White's statement that Nella-Rose wasn't more than half real seemed,
in the light of present happenings, little less than bald fact.

"It was the way _you_ looked--way back there when I was ten years old. I
had run away--"

"Are you always running away?" asked Truedale from the hollow depths of
unreality.

"I run away a smart lot. You have to if you want to--see things and be
different."

"And you--you want to be different, Nella-Rose?"

"I--why, can't you see?--I _am_ different."