"Now, then!" he said, keeping his eyes on his breezy little guest. "What have you got to tell me--before you go?" "It's something that happened--long ago. You will not laugh if I tell you? You laugh right much." "I? You think I laugh a good deal? Good Lord! Some folk think I don't laugh enough." He had his friends back home in mind, and somehow the memory steadied him for an instant. "P'r'aps they-all don't know you as well as I do." This with amusing conviction. "Perhaps they don't." Truedale was deadly solemn. "But go on, Nella-Rose. I promise not to laugh now." "It was the beginning of--you!" The girl turned her eyes to the fire--she was quaintly demure. "At first when I saw you looking in that window, yonder, I was right scared." Jim White's statement that Nella-Rose wasn't more than half real seemed, in the light of present happenings, little less than bald fact. "It was the way _you_ looked--way back there when I was ten years old. I had run away--" "Are you always running away?" asked Truedale from the hollow depths of unreality. "I run away a smart lot. You have to if you want to--see things and be different." "And you--you want to be different, Nella-Rose?" "I--why, can't you see?--I _am_ different." "Of course. I only meant--do you like to be different." "I have to like it. I was born with a cawl." "In heaven's name, what's that?" "Something over your eyes, and when they take it off you see more, and farther, than any one else. You're part ha'nt." Truedale wiped his forehead--the room was getting hot, but the heat alone was not responsible for his emotions; he was being carried beyond his depth--beyond himself--by the wild fascination of the little creature before him. He would hardly have been surprised had a draught of air wafted her out of the window like a bit of mountain mist. "But you mustn't interrupt so much!" She turned a stern face upon him. "I ran away that time to see a--railroad train! One of the niggers told me about it--he said it was the Bogy Man. I wanted to know, so I went to the station. It's a right smart way down and I had to sleep one night under the trees. Don't the stars look starry sometimes?" The interruption made Truedale jump. "They certainly do," he said, looking at the soft, dark eyes with their long lashes. "I wasn't afraid--and I didn't hurry. It was evening, and the sun just a-going down, when I got to the station. There wasn't any one about so I--I ran down the big road the train comes on--to meet it. And then" (here Nella-Rose clasped her hands excitedly and her breath came short), "and then I saw it a-coming and a-coming. The big fire-eye a-glaring and the mighty noise a-snorting and I reckoned it was old Master Satan and I just--couldn't move!" "Go on! go on!" Truedale bent close to her--she had caught him in the mesh of her dramatic charm.