fond of staring and staring and saying nothing--and yet, he
remembered, when she talked she gave no hint at all of any deep sense
of the beauty of her surroundings. When she talked she was just like
other town girls he had known, a bit slangy, more than a bit
self-possessed, and frivolous to the point of being flippant. That
type he knew and could meet fairly on a level. But when she was
looking and saying nothing, she seemed altogether different. Which, he
wondered, was the real Marion Rose?

While he stood gazing, she turned and looked down at him; a little
blankly at first, as though she had just waked from sleep or from
abstraction too deep for instant recovery. Then she smiled and changed
her position, putting up both hands to pat and pull her hair into
neatness; and with the movement she ceased to be a brooding goddess of
the mountain tops, and became again the girl who had perversely taken
the telephone away from him, the girl who had played mock billiards
upon his beloved chart, the girl who said--she said it now, while he
was thinking of her melodious way of saying it.

"Well, what do you know about that?" she inquired, making a gesture
with one arm toward the fire while with the other she fumbled in her
absurd little vanity bag. "It just burns as if it had a grudge against
the country, doesn't it? But isn't it perfectly gorgeous, with all
that sunset and everything! It looks like a Bliffen ten-reel picture.
He ought to see it--he could get some great pointers for his next big
picture. Wouldn't that be just dandy on the screen?" She had found her
powder puff and her tiny mirror, and she was dabbing at her nose and
her cheeks, which no more needed powder than did the little birds that
chirped around her. Between dabs, she was looking down the mountain,
with an occasional wave of her puff toward some particularly