"From necessity. When I first came to the mountains, it seemed safer to cook than to be cooked for." The girl was paying little attention. She watched Channing fearfully. He was still unconscious, livid; but the school-teacher appeared to feel no alarm. He went deftly and quite unhurried about his preparations, getting out a hypodermic syringe, a bottle of chloroform, placing certain instruments in the oven, others in boiling water. Jacqueline shivered; but she went on with the conversation gallantly, striving to face the situation as her mother or Jemima would have faced it. "I know one other man who can cook, but he's a minister, and they're always different, somehow. He learned in the mountains, too, by the way, because there was nobody but himself and his father to take care of his sick mother. He learned all sorts of things to help her ... how to sew on buttons, and mend clothes, and sweep--He can even darn stockings! And he's not a bit ashamed of it." "I should think," murmured the other, "that he might be even proud of it. You find him unmanly, perhaps?" "Unmanly! Philip?" The tone of her voice answered him. "Why, he's the manliest man I know!" The teacher said nothing further; but she got the impression that he was listening, waiting for her to go on. "Do you know," she said, "I feel as if I knew you, as if I might have known you all my life. Have I never seen you before?" "I think not," he replied, in a low voice.--Who can tell how much is seen by little eyes newly opened upon the world? Perhaps vision is clearer then than afterwards, when speech and sound and crowding thoughts come to obscure it. "Have you always lived in these mountains?" He answered with a slight hesitation. "I came here seventeen years ago." "And do you never go down to the lowlands?" "No." "Then I can't have known you before," she said disappointedly, "because I am only seventeen myself." A shrewder observer--Jemima for instance--might have noted his hesitancy, might have realized that coming to a place does not imply remaining there continuously. But Jacqueline was not shrewd. She took people literally, and understood just what they intended her to understand. The art of prevarication was unknown to her; though, as has been seen, she could lie upon occasion, with a large and primitive simplicity. "Now then," said the teacher briskly. "If you are ready, young lady, we shall go after that bullet." She shrank away, quivering, all her fine pretense at composure shattered. "O-oh, but you don't expect _me_ to help you? I can't, I never can help with things like that! I'm not like mother and Jemmy. I couldn't bear it. He might groan! I can't stand it when they groan!" The other frowned. "You are not a coward, I think, afraid of a little blood?" "It's not the blood--though I don't like that a bit. It's the pain. It's when they groan. Please, please!--It's horrible enough when you don't care for them, but when you do--"