“She’s a treasure and I don’t know what we’d do without her. We can’t bring colored servants with us from home. There isn’t society enough here for them. But I’m afraid the Mission school hasn’t been able to change her temperament, although it has improved her English. Somehow you don’t mind her frankness much when you get used to her.” “I don’t mind even now,” returned Allston. “She’s honest, at any rate.” “She’s honest and she’s good,” nodded Wilmer, serving him with cold tea. “And a firm believer in fairies.” “Is that to her advantage or not?” questioned Allston. She hesitated. Allston was on the whole surprised at that. He himself might have hesitated if asked to consider the question seriously, but he did not expect it of her. And he was more or less puzzled and interested by her answer. “If she’d only believe in bad fairies too,” she said. “Nonsense,” broke in the father. “That’s a paradox. All fairies are good. As soon as they aren’t, they are something else.” “Father is as gallant to the fairies as to the ladies,” she smiled with evident fond appreciation of that quality. “Wilmer is worried about a young mountaineer who has lately been paying his attentions to Roxie,” broke in Howe, throwing some light on the argument. “He hasn’t a very good reputation, it’s true. But I tell her that a man can’t throw a woman over his saddle like in the old days and make off with the lady against her will.” “Which might be true,” put in Wilmer. “Except that some of these mountain folk are still living in the old days. Bud Childers is hardly more than a cave man.” “And he’s your bad fairy?” asked Allston. “Or the something else,” she smiled. “Fairy, good or bad, is rather a light name for a six-foot man.” Perhaps she felt the conversation had swung into too personal a channel, for deftly she turned it aside to the more general discussion of the effect of Mission schools upon these people. She had rather positive views. Allston listened politely, but not so much to what she said as to the melody of her voice and to the quick play of expression on her fine face, particularly about the mouth. She had a mouth such as is generations in the making--two sensitive lips, full without being too full, thin without being too thin, balanced nicely, almost exquisitely, above a firm, if rounded chin. Her straight nose matched the chin rather than the mouth. It came from her father rather than her mother, he thought. The eyes were a girl’s eyes grown, by much reading, a bit mature before her time. She controlled them a little too well for youth, perhaps, and yet at moments Allston caught in them flashes as wayward as sunbeams.