the mountains and nourished in the solitude of the plains.

How different the girls of fifteen or sixteen such as he had known
in the city or in sophisticated villages in the East! Lahoma had
not been so engrossed by trivial activities of exacting days that
she had lacked time for thought. Her housekeeping cares were few
and devoid of routine, leaving most of the hours of each day for
reading, for day-dreaming, for absorbed meditation. Somehow the
dreams seemed to linger in, her voice, to hover upon her brow, to
form a part of her; and the longings of those dreams were
half-veiled in her eyes, looking out shyly as if afraid of wounding
her guardians by full revelation. She wanted to meet life, to take
a place in the world--but what would then become of Willock and
Bill?

"Bill used to live seven miles away at the mountain with the
precipice," she went on, after she had told about the wonderful
window. "But it was too far off. When he got to know me, it tired
him, walking this far twice a day, morning and night,--didn't it,
Bill! So at last Brick and Bill decided to cut some cedars from the
mountain and make me a cabin,--they took the dugout to sleep in.
There are two rooms in the cabin, one, the kitchen where we eat--and
the other, my parlor where I sleep. Some time you shall visit me
in the cabin, if Brick and Bill are willing. They made it for me,
so I couldn't ask anybody in, unless they said so."

"We aren't far enough along," observed Bill, "to be shut up together
under a roof."

"I'd like to have you visit my parlor," Lahoma said somewhat