“You can use the moon, if you need it for identification purposes, but that lightning was enough for me,” I answered, retiring from his eyes for a hot-cheeked second under the silk handkerchief around his neck. “It may take time and moonlight to teach you me, but I knew you in a flash. I know it’s awful, but most women learn love by lightning, and it’s agony to have to wait while men slowly arrive at it by the light of the sun, moon, and stars. Will nothing ever teach them to hurry?” “I should say,” answered Gabriel, with a delicious laugh, which I got double benefit of, for I both heard it and felt it, “that I had met you at least half-way.” “And I’m a perfect stranger to you,” I was reiterating honestly, when an amazed answer arrived from the other side of the rock. “Well, you don’t look it--perfect strangers!” came in Dudley’s astonished voice, as he rose from beneath the crag and stood beside us. “You old psalm-singer, you, where did you get that girl?” he demanded with a great, but, for the circumstances, very calm, interest. “Just picked her up in the woods, where she has always been waiting for me, you old log-killer, you. Yes, I guessed the fact that she is your sister, but I dare you to try to take her away from me,” answered Gabriel, as he held me closer, when, with sisterly dignity, I tried to get into a position to squelch Dudley. “I’ll never try,” answered Dudley, with devout thankfulness sounding in his voice up from his diaphragm. “Maybe you can hold her down, Gates; you seem to have got a good grip for a starter. The family never could.” Yes, my dear Evelyn, Gabriel turned out to be that wonderful Gates Attwood to whom Chicago has given five million dollars to build his great Temple of Labor down on the South Side. He has been up here visiting Dudley at his camp at Pigeon Creek, hiding for a little rest for three months, and circuit-riding the mountaineers. If I had met him under the shelter of my own roof-tree, I in evening dress, with the lights on, I would have taken one insolent look at him, and then talked to Bobby the rest of the evening, while Aunt Grace raged in pantomime at mother about me. I realized this the instant Dudley called his name, and I turned and hid my eyes against his lips as I trembled at such an escape from losing him. “I never belonged to anybody but you and--God. That’s what made me bad to the others before I was found and claimed,” I whispered across his cheek, while he nestled me still deeper into his breast, ignoring Dudley, as he deserved. “God’s good woman, and mine,” was the low answer I felt and heard.