“Aunt Margot is getting better—Margaret her real name is—and I don’t know that I ought to call her ‘aunt’ after what she did to me ... but do you know I can’t help feeling sorry for her. She was really unbalanced when she put that through—had been becoming so for some time, so the doctors say.”

On the sidehill, near Camp Chicolee, on a spring day, two girls sat talking.

Below them, on the mountain, their horses grazed.

“Wasn’t it lovely of father to arrange for us to spend our Easter holidays, part of them, up here, at the farm—the stock farm?” remarked Una, beginning again, on another tack. “And to have the horses sent up here for us, too!”

“And to think of Revelation being my horse! I never—never can get over that.” The eyes of Pemrose rested upon the long, lithe shape—upon the finely curry-combed coat glistening, amberlike, in the April sunlight. “Menzies—Donald Menzies—didn’t like it one bit,” she dimpled mischievously, “his being given to me. He wanted to sell him.”

“Menzies needn’t complain,” said Una hotly, looking down at the tall figure of the farmer out in the Long Pasture. “Father is going to send Sanbie, his son, to college when he leaves high school, lend him the money to go—a loan he never means to take back. They say that boy, burnt and exhausted as he was, just searched all through the night I was lost, saying: ‘Now you see her—and now you don’t!’”

A little mischief crept into the rippling tones, too—fixing a stationary star in Una’s dark eye.

Pemrose sat very still upon her warm rock, crop in hand, gazing down at the Long Pasture—its colts and horses.

Seven months had passed since Andrew wheeled Revel on the verge of a washout, where the road had been eaten away—months in which the two girls had tasted the novel excitements of boarding school life, minus radio between their two rooms—and it was the first time that Una had seemed inclined to talk freely and naturally of a wild ride up and down Little Sister Mountain—Little Sister smiling under her April curl papers of mist.

“Yes, Mr. Grosvenor said the horse which carried me after you should never go out of the family,” dimpled Pemrose, “and that, as I was an honorary member thereof, he was going to give him to me,” arching black eyebrows. “He’d have made Treff a present of Cartoon, too, only ‘Hop’—I call him that when I want to tease him—said he wouldn’t have that old Sickle Face, at any price.... But what put Her—I’m not going to call her your aunt—into your head now?”

“Father has been to see her lately.” Una’s lip corners twitched a little. “You know she was taken to a hospital, very ill with brain fever, after Andrew stopped the two horses on the verge of that washed-out bank—Andrew has never stopped, calling himself a ‘fool-body’, since, because he didn’t let her go over.”

There was the faintest note of a chuckle in the voice now.

“So you can talk about it easily; can you?” Pemrose glanced, sidelong, at her friend, murmuring silently to herself. “It seems as if that night in the cabin on Little Sister was a ‘canny moment’ as Andrew calls the hour of birth,” with a mute little quiver of laughter. “And so—and so She’s getting better,” she said aloud.

“Yes, she was very weak after the fever and either couldn’t or wouldn’t remember—things. But now she seems softened—sorry for what she did.”

“So she jolly well may be—as Treff would say!” Pemrose kicked at the grass with her riding-boot. “I suppose it was she who set fire to the shed?”

“She—she has never owned up to that.” Una’s lip corners drooped—there was almost a squint in the soft dark eyes which gazed down at the spot where that tool shed had stood. “How the blaze could have started otherwise I—I don’t know,” quiveringly. “But she has confessed to father that when she came back to these mountains, after living in one big city after another, it was, really, because she was lonely and wanted to see me—see how I had grown up. But she was so bitter against father and mother that she wouldn’t even let them know that she was alive—so she kept spying upon me invisibly—trying to influence me. As for her mad idea of kidnapping me—carrying me off—I think it grew out of frantic resentment against mother.”

“But think how she went about it, the slyboots!” cried Pemrose. “Of course she must have found it awfully hard to waylay you; you were so—so ‘peerie-weerie’,” laughingly; “so seldom beyond the garden, alone!”

“Yes, and so she maneuvered with some of the tricks she played upon the simple mountain folk!” said Una. “Her cabin was all wired for electricity; at half-a-dozen different points, by touching an unseen button with an elbow or foot—some part of her anatomy—she could set invisible tuning forks vibrating—or some other—musical device. From that it was an easy step to playing upon my curiosity—in the rÔle of ‘Magic Margot’ she carried some of her paraphernalia around with her, I suppose,” with a catch of the breath, half sob, half laughter.

“Yes, besides her radio equipment.” Pemrose’s black eyebrows drew together. “Did she—did she confess how she managed to overcome you the night of the fire?”

“Father drew it out of her, bit by bit; she rubbed something on the handle of the bucket, when it rolled away from me—you see she was waylaying me then—some strong acid, so that when my fingers touched the handle again it stung me—burned, prickled! Ugh!” Una lifted her fingers as she had raised them, long ago, in the sun parlor and looked at them. “There was a little drug mixed with the acid, so that when I rubbed my fingers to my lips—as she guessed I would do—I got just enough of that to stupefy me—at least, make me powerless to resist her. If that hadn’t ‘worked’ I suppose she’d have tried some other means, but she didn’t want to hurt or frighten me.”

“Well, of all the crazy cunning!” The other girl simply gasped. “I suppose there was some of the same concoction on the little bunch of wild flowers that fell at your feet in the wood.... And I—I wouldn’t believe you that anything happened—anything unusual that morning! Sometimes—” Pemrose slowly shook her head—“sometimes, Daddy says, I’m as wilful as an acid,” laughingly, “an acid eating into salt—and it doesn’t do to be that way, eh?” The blue eyes were mischievous, the lip corners penitent.

“But You! It was you who saved me. You won out against her—with radio,” cried the victim of that unbalanced cunning. “It was you—you who picked up my message—how I ever ticked it off, I don’t know—remembered enough to tick it off! But you found out where I was.” Una’s lip was trembling now—she dashed her hand across her eyes, one bright drop, dislodged, fell upon the mountain grass. “It was when Andrew saw your signal, your creamy sweater, waving from the tree on Little Sister that he knew I was somewhere on that mountain. Immediately he thought of that awful bank, that washout, in the road—then he caught sight of us and climbed—oh! it was an awful climb, too, right through the stream’s bed, for a short cut—was just in time to head us off!”

“I know-ow.” Pemrose’s tone was very low. She caught an April cowslip in the leather loop of her riding crop—there was silence for five minutes. “But you—you yourself, were the real wonder,” she said, then in the same low, thick voice. “Treff—Treff has never got over talking of the way you came through—the clues you left behind you—bits of your habit!”

“I carved them out with a knife I found—and she never saw me!”

Was it a new Una: the mischief, shrewdness—young strength—leaking out of the eye-corners?

“And the bit—the little bit of your flower clock—oh-h! when I saw that....” Pemrose’s hand pressed her lips.

“In case the rags might blow away that was! She—she was watching me all the time; she’d have noticed if I tried to pin them down—the flowers, she thought I was just playing with them!” More mischief, more young strength, the lip corners curling up towards the curly eyelashes—dark eyes twinkling.

“But how on earth did you find your feet, at all?” cried Pemrose desperately. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to ask you. How did you begin to come through—‘crash through’?”

“I think I found the Hidden Fire.” It was almost a whisper with which Una bent to the Spring in the cowslip’s heart.