don't make it. A girl who's sobbing in a ball gown can be quite as
miserable as you would be, unhappy in your homespun."

She was impatient of his moralizing. "I know that," she said. "Dellaw,
don't you suppose I've got some sense? But it ain't _quite_ true,
neither. Maybe if I was going to be unhappy I'd be just as much so in a
silk dress as I would in this here cotton one that I've got on; but I
guess there's times when I'd be happier in the silk than I _would_ be in
this. My, I wisht I had one!"

He looked at her appraisingly. She would, he thought, be wondrous
beautiful if given the accessories which girls more fortunate had at
their hand. Beautiful, she was, undoubtedly, without them; with them she
would be--he almost caught his breath at thought of it--sensational!

Mentally he ran over all the girls he knew in a swift survey of memory.
Not one of them, he thought, could really compare with her. Even Barbara
Holton, with her haughty, big featured, strikingly handsome face,
although she had attracted him in days passed, seemed singularly
unattractive to him, now.

While he sat, musing thus, almost forgetful of the puzzling ABC, she
gazed off across the valley dreamily, the ABC's as far from her. It was
a lovely prospect of bare crag and wooded slope, green fields and
low-hung clouds, with, at its center, here and there the silver of the
stream which, back among the forest trees, supplied the water to the
hidden pool where she had watched him, furtively, the first time she had
ever seen him. But it was not of the fair prospect that the girl was
thinking. The coming of the stranger had brought into her life a hundred
new emotions, ten thousand puzzling guesses at the life which lay beyond