“This is my girl,” she would say. “Azalea McBirney. Come, Azalea, let’s go in and see if they have something that’ll do for the makings of a dress. How’d you like a green gingham—pale green you know? And that there white barred stuff ain’t but fifteen cents a yard. How d’ye do, Mr. Constance? Pretty day, ain’t it? Do you reckon you could take these here eggs and let me do a little trading with you? Yes, this is the girl. You can call her my girl, when you’re speaking of her. I’d like to get her outfitted here at your place if you’d be so kind, Mr. Constance.” Azalea stood facing her new world, so to speak, and on every face she saw welcome. CHAPTER V THE SHOALS “Jim,” cried Azalea, “my room’s done at last. Come see it, quick!” “I’ve looked at that room and looked at it. I don’t believe it’s any different from what it was yesterday.” “James Stuart McBirney, it is too! Ma’s hung a blue curtain over the place where my clothes hang, and she’s got a braided rug on the floor and a cheesecloth curtain at the window, and she’s covered my stand with blue and white print. The way she’s fixed up those cones and pine leaves, you’d never know the looking glass was broke. It’s the prettiest room I ever saw. Oh, Jim, do come!” Jim pretended that he wasn’t interested, and stamped up the new stairs his father had built, and along the platform which led to the attic room which had been given Azalea for her own. Although Jim was supposed not to care anything about the room, he had, nevertheless, braided a hammock of warp such as his mother used on her loom, and this hammock had been swung out on the platform. Azalea could lie there and look straight up the mountain side. Jim had helped, too, with the making of the bedstead and the splint-bottomed chairs and the dresser, and in the bottom of his heart he thought it was just the kind of a room Azalea ought to have—she was so pretty and—well, Jim couldn’t quite find the word to describe her—but she reminded him of a pinky-white trillium. Not that he would have said so. He treated her just as if she had been his own sister, and that means that he led her rather a hard life at times. But that didn’t seem to bother Azalea at all. She would do anything for him, and she could tease back when she had a mind to, and when he “got her in a corner,” as he put it, she laughed her ringing laugh. “Some girls would get mad to be treated the way Jim treats Azalea,” ma used to say. “But she’s got the sweetest disposition of anybody I ever saw.” “Not too sweet to hold her own,” answered Thomas McBirney. “At first I thought to myself, have to pitch in and take that girl’s part, but after a time I says to myself, I reckon I’ll leave them two young uns to take care of theirselves.”