"Thank Heaven, you're not!" he cried. "I've never met a girl fit to hold a candle to you. Why, you're the freest, bravest, sweetest thing that ever lived." The hot blood burned slowly into her cheek under its dusky coloring. His words were music to her, and yet they did not satisfy. "You're wrapping it up nicely, but we both know that I'm a vixen when I get angry," she said quietly. "We used to have an old Indian woman work for us. When I was just a wee bit of a thing she called me Little Cactus Tongue." "That's nothing. The boys were probably always teasing you and you defended yourself. In a way the life you have led has made you hard. But it is just a surface hardness nature has provided as a protection to you." "Since it is there, I don't see that it helps much to decide why it is a part of me," she returned with a wan little smile. "But it does," he insisted. "It matters a lot. The point is that it isn't you at all. Some day you'll slough it the way a butterfly does its shell." "When?" she wanted to know incredulously. He did not look at her while he blurted out his answer. "When you are happily married to a man you love who loves you." "Oh! I'm afraid that will be never." She tried to say it lightly, but her face glowed from the heat of an inward fire. "There's a deep truth in the story of the princess who slept the years away until the prince came along and touched her lips with his. Don't you think lots of people are hampered by their environment? All they need is escape." He suggested this with a shy diffidence. "Oh, we all make that excuse for ourselves," she answered with a touch of impatient scorn. "I'm all the time doing it. I say if things were different I would be a nice, sweet-tempered, gentle girl and not fly out like that Katherine in Shakespeare's play. But I know all the time it isn't true. We have to conquer ourselves. There is no city of refuge from our own temperaments." He felt sure there was a way out from her fretted life for this deep-breasted, supple daughter of the hills if she could only find it. She had breathed an atmosphere that made for suspicion and harshness. All her years she had been forced to fight to save herself from shame. But Roy, as he looked at her, imaged another picture of Beulah Rutherford. Little children clung to her knees and called her "Mother." She bent over them tenderly, her face irradiated with love. A man whose features would not come clear strode toward her and the eyes she lifted to his were pools of light. Beaudry drew a deep breath and looked away from her into the fire. "I wish time would solve my problem as surely as it will yours," he said. She looked at him eagerly, lips parted, but she would not in words invite his confession.