The Gold Trail | Page 9

north, at
least, we have odd bits of rugged grandeur where the wildness of the
hills about one is emphasized by the green fertility of the valleys. There
is a typical place where we spent a few months last year that I should
like you to see. If you come back with us, as you half promised, we will
take you there."
Weston leaned forward a little, for he had still a curious tenderness for
the land of the fells and dales in which he had been born. He did not
know that Ida Stirling, who had watched him closely when Kinnaird
addressed him, had now fixed her eyes on him again. The latter turned
to her as he proceeded.
"The old house," he said, "would make a picture in itself with its little
stone-ribbed windows, and the much older square tower and curtain
wall that form one wing. There is a terraced garden in front, and a
stream comes frothing out of a wooded ghyll at the foot of it."
Weston started, for there was no doubt that the house Kinnaird
described was the one in which he had been born. As it happened, the
firelight fell upon his intent face as he waited for the answer, when
Miss Stirling, who had missed his start, asked a question:

"The people who owned it were friends of yours?"
"No," said Kinnaird, "I never saw them. I took the place through an
agency for the rough shooting and as a change from London. They had
to let it and live in a neighboring town. The result of slack management
and agricultural depression, I believe."
Weston set his lips. He had written home once rejecting a proposition
made him, and his people had afterward apparently forgotten him. He
had made up his mind that he would not trouble them again, at least
while he toiled as a track-grader or a hired man; but now, when it
seemed that trouble had come upon them, he regretted many things.
Kinnaird signed to him that he might take away the plates, and he
gathered them up, scarcely conscious of what he was doing, and then
stumbled and dropped the pile of them. Though made of indurated fiber,
they fell with a startling clatter, and Kinnaird looked at him sharply as
he picked them up; but in another few moments he had vanished
beyond the range of the firelight into the shadows of the bush.
Ida Stirling had, however, noticed enough to arouse a young woman's
curiosity, especially as there was a suggestion of romance in it, and
before she went to sleep she thought a good deal about the man she had
never seen until two days ago.
CHAPTER III
THE MODEL
The morning broke clear and still across the scented bush, and Miss
Kinnaird and Ida Stirling, who had been awakened early by the
wonderful freshness in the mountain air, strolled some distance out of
camp. For a time they wandered through shadowy aisles between the
tremendous trunks, breathing in sweet resinous odors, and then, soon
after the first sunrays came slanting across a mountain shoulder, they
came out upon a head of rock above the river. A hemlock had fallen
athwart it, and they sat down where they could look out upon a majestic
panorama of towering rock and snow.

Arabella Kinnaird gazed at it intently when she had shaken some of the
dew from the frills and folds of her rather bedraggled skirt.
"It will never be quite the same again," she observed, evidently in
reference to the latter, and then waved one hand as though to indicate
the panorama, for she was usually voluble and disconnected in her
conversation. "This, as I said last night, is wonderful--in fact, it almost
oppresses one. It makes one feel so little, and I'm not sure that I like
that, though no doubt it does one good."
Her companion smiled.
"Aren't you going to paint it?" she asked.
Miss Kinnaird pursed up her face, which was a trick she had.
"Oh," she said, "I don't know. After all, portraiture is my specialty, and
this silent grandeur is a little beyond my interpretation."
She paused, and added the next few words in an authoritative manner,
as though she had a truth of some consequence to deliver:
"The difficulty is that you really can't interpret anything until you are
quite sure what it means. You see, I'm feverishly restless by
temperament, and accustomed to indulge in all kinds of petty,
purposeless activities. They are petty, though the major calls them
duties--social duties--and being, I'm afraid, a rather frivolous person in
spite of my love of art, they appeal to me."
Ida said nothing. It was not necessary, and as a rule not advisable, to
encourage Arabella Kinnaird when she