“It seems like I’m not the way other girls are. I’ve had such a strange life, Pa McBirney.” “Well it hain’t been very long yet, girl—hardly long enough to be strange, you might say.” “Yes it has, pa. It’s been short and strange. Now really, you know, I ought to be living in The Shoals. That’s my house—at least, I mean it might have been. That old Colonel Atherton you told Jim about, and that he told me about, was my grandfather.” She said it in a musing way, as if she attached very little importance to it, and her hand still rested on the arm of Pa McBirney. “What’s that!” roared pa. “What you saying, girl? Whoa there, Mac. Whoa Nannie.” He brought the horses to such a short stop that the stones crashed away from hoofs and wheels down the steep grade of the road. “Just say that again, will ye?” “I found it out while I was away, pa. Betty Bowen told me. She said mamma never wanted to come down this way, so near her old home, until just at the last, when she knew she couldn’t live. But it don’t matter, pa. You don’t think any less of me for being the granddaughter of that man, do you? I can’t help being related to him anyway.” “Sho!” exclaimed pa. “What you talking about, girl? He may have been a foolish man in the heat of all the trouble of the war, and done things that hadn’t ought to have been done, but he was quality, Azalea. They was great folks, the Athertons.” “Well, the only ones I know anything about,” said Azalea with a choke in her voice, “were wandering show folks; and one of them was a friendless orphan, Pa McBirney, till you and ma took her in. There wasn’t any great folks about her. There was just a miserable little wretch. Don’t change toward me, pa, please, please! Don’t go and tell Jim and Hi. Maybe they’d think I was putting on airs. Just let everything go on the way it is.” “Nothing ever goes on the way it was,” said pa profoundly, clucking to his horses. “But I see what you mean, girl, and since you and me is pretty good friends, I’ll do what you want me to do. I’ll stand by you because we are friends.” He felt the girl’s grateful lips pressed against the rough sleeve of his coat, and he laughed down at her in a kindly, almost pitying way. “See here, Zalie,” he said, “don’t you get to caring too much for us. Don’t you get to caring too much for nothing. You hear me? Keep calm, Zalie. Keep calm. Folks that cares too much gets in a lot of trouble.” “Do they?” laughed the girl. The remark seemed to strike her as very funny, and her gay laughter rang out like silver bells on the night air. The horses quickened their steps as they heard it, and a discouraged looking old “houn’-dog” came out from a tumble-down cabin and bayed at them. But Pa McBirney refused to be amused. “I mean what I say,” he declared. Azalea pulled herself together and stopped laughing.