The faded gentlewoman had found her word. “He is very _sharp_,” she said definitely. “You’ve said it!” Darrow was not subtle himself and rarely detected subtlety in others. “Sharp as a lancet! Lemme tell you, this lad’s going to get ahead in the world.” “I daresay,” Miss Ada conceded, her upper lip spelling faint distaste. “Glen, my dear--I have so many papers waiting for correction....” She half rose, but seated herself again at the doctor’s peremptory gesture, and discussed without enthusiasm the question of his grading. It disappointed Glen to sense the dislike and distrust which her friends felt for each other. She had wanted “Miz-_za_da” to thrill over their golden legend, but the shabby teacher, pausing at the door, took a long, measuring look at the bold and beautiful young mountaineer and returned his frank scorn with a delicate, futile, birdlike antagonism which the girl found pathetically amusing. CHAPTER V _Dr. Darrow damns the first families with his last breath, and little Miss Nancy Carey meets the young mountaineer._ FROM the time she was fourteen--almost, indeed, from the moment of the first meeting, Glen Darrow knew that some day, when she was old enough, she would fall in love with Luke Manders. She accepted this knowledge without excitement or self-consciousness, as simply as she accepted the other undebatable facts of her life and circumstances. It was just as another girl might know that she was going to college after she finished high school, or a third, that her aunt would take her abroad when she was eighteen. She _knew_ it, that was all, in a grave preoccupation, in a certain serene young sense of dedication. The thing was settled; it hadn’t to be worried about. It would have been amusing to an observer in possession of the facts to see how sedulously both her father and Miss Ada Tenafee avoided all discussion, all mention even, of such a possibility--the man, because he desired it so heartily and feared to frustrate his hopes by forcing, and the woman because she turned from the idea with all the inhibitions of her caste and type, and was craftily aware that opposition would fan the flame.