She drew Azalea closer to her, and the girl nestled her face for a moment against Mrs. Carson’s soft cheek. “It’s the mountains, mamma Carson,” she replied. “Carin and I want to go up there and teach school the way we planned last summer. You remember, don’t you?” “So that’s it! Well, that’s not a very dark conspiracy. There wouldn’t be any objection if we weren’t going abroad.” “But it’s because you are going abroad, mamma,” cried Carin, “and because I don’t really want to go, that this plan seems so—so timely.” Well, that was where the argument began. It was continued at the dinner table; it was taken up the next day with the McBirneys as soon as ever they showed their faces in the village, so that they were not, after all, allowed to approach the subject in that gradual and cautious manner advised by Azalea; it was carried to the Reverend Absalom Summers and his wife Barbara. Even Jonathan Summers, aged three, took a hand in it by pulling Azalea’s skirt and saying: “Don’t go! Don’t go.” Mr. Carson explained the situation to Mr. Summers after this fashion: “It’s not that I am really so keen about taking Carin on this trip; and I certainly have no objection to her making herself useful, but going to live upon a wild mountain among wilder people doesn’t appeal to me as the best thing for young girls to do. I doubt if it would be safe.” “Safe?” roared the Reverend Absalom, who had been a mountain man himself and to whom the honor of the mountaineers was dear. “Safe, Mr. Carson! Do you mean to insinuate that those girls wouldn’t be as safe on Dundee Mountain as here in the town of Lee? Are you not aware that women are honored and protected in the remotest regions of our mountains?” Mr. Carson enjoyed the outbreaks of his friend and was not at all put out at having provoked one. His smile led Mr. Summers to suppose that his eloquence had not been vigorous enough, so he resumed in a louder tone of voice: “We may do a good many things up on the mountain that aren’t generally approved of by people living in the valleys; we may quarrel among ourselves, and we may forget to pay the government the tax on our whiskey; we may be lazy—we _are_ lazy, if you like; we may have different ideas of enjoyment from those you have, but if you think there is any human panther among us who—” Mr. Carson roared with laughter. “No, Summers,” he cried, waving his hands to stop the stream of protest, “I don’t think so—I don’t think anything. But you know yourself that if the girls go up to Sunset Gap, they’ve got to have a reliable, sensible, agreeable woman along with them. Now where shall we find anyone like that? She must like roughing it, yet she’ll have to be a refined, companionable woman. She must know how to keep the pantry stocked, do the cooking, and yet be a restraint to our impulsive young people. Such a person is hard to find.”