“You don’t seem nearly so tired and sleepy as I am, Zalie dear. Sit by me and hold my hand,” pleaded Carin. “You’ll lie next me, won’t you—quite close? The mountain seems huge, doesn’t it? Like a kind beast. Isn’t it breathing? I feel as if it were breathing. Deep breaths. Where do you suppose my own, own father and mother are to-night? It was queer that I didn’t want to go with them, wasn’t it? I wonder if it was because I didn’t wish to leave you, ‘honey-bird’—as Mr. Thompson calls you. Why didn’t he bring his fiddle? He doesn’t look right to me without his fiddle. Oh—h, how tired I am. Sing, Azalea: ‘Now the day is over.’” Carin hummed the first line; Azalea took it up at the second, and the soft silence of the night was broken by the harmony of their voices. Azalea remembered the evening, long ago, when she had heard Carin and her father and mother singing that far down the trail. That was the night they had come to ask her to be Carin’s adopted sister—the night she had weighed her love for Ma McBirney in the balance with riches and opportunity, and had decided in favor of the mountain cabin and Ma McBirney’s love. Carin slept quickly, but she was over-tired; her slender shoulders twitched spasmodically, and the hand Azalea held would clutch and then as suddenly relax. “Oh, me,” thought Azalea, suddenly anxious, “are we forgetting how delicate and tender she is? What if she should be ill, with her mother so far away! We aren’t looking after her the way we ought. She can’t stand the things the rest of us can. I must have a talk with Aunt Zillah at once.” She drew her hand softly from Carin’s grasp and looked about her for Aunt Zillah. Someone paced slowly up and down beneath the trees at no great distance, and Azalea ran to see who it was. “It’s only Keefe,” said a voice in answer to her low inquiry. “Not the person you’re looking for, I’m sure.” “I happened to be looking for Aunt Zillah,” said Azalea; “but why shouldn’t I be looking for you, Keefe O’Connor?” “Because you never do—you never have—never will. Nobody looks for me. Nobody worries about me. I come and go as I please—and don’t like it. I had some hope at the beginning of the season that Mrs. Rowantree would worry about me—she seemed so nice. But she hasn’t a speck of worry to spare from Himself and the children. Then I thought maybe Miss Pace would devote at least ten minutes a day to worrying about me, but _she_ hasn’t shown a sign of it. She never asks me where I come from or who I am, or why I am, or—” “Why, Keefe O’Connor, you’re as unjust as you can be. She hasn’t asked you—none of us has asked you—because we thought that for some reason you didn’t want to tell.” Keefe stopped short in his pacing, and standing twenty feet from the girl, let one cold word drop between them. “Oh!”