"Oh, mother!" the girl cried, "wasn't it good I could come?" and she
kissed her again. Then she turned to me--I had followed out in the
starlight--"Uncle Jim sent me word you were here, and I was so glad.
I've always wanted to see somebody paint, and Uncle Jim says he's sure
you will let me go sketching with you. I wasn't coming home with the
other girls until I got his letter and knew that you were here."
She said this frankly and simply, without the slightest embarrassment,
and without a trace of any dialect in her speech. Jim evidently had not
exaggerated her attainments. She had, too, unconsciously to herself,
solved one of the mysteries that surrounded me. If Jim was her uncle it
must be on her mother's side; it certainly could not be on Marvin's.
"And I'm glad, too," I replied. "Of course you shall go, and Jim tells
me also that you are as good a woodsman as he is. And so Jim's your
uncle, is he? He never told me that."
"Oh, no," she answered quickly, with a little deprecatory air.
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