Page:Cornelia Meigs-The Pirate of Jasper Peak.djvu/21

 hotel and beyond that, at the end of the road, the shining blue of the lake. He was vaguely conscious that, at every cottage window, white-headed children of all sizes and ages bobbed up to stare at him and ducked shyly out of sight  again when they caught his eye. Between two houses he looked down to a sunny field where a  woman with a three-cornered yellow kerchief on  her head was helping some men at work. She did not look like an American woman at all,  Hugh thought as he stopped to watch her, but  walked on abashed when even she paused to look  at him, leaning on her rake and shading her eyes  with her hand. He rather liked her looks, somehow, even at that distance, she seemed so strong, in spite of her slenderness and she handled her  rake with such vigorous sun-burned arms.

He raised his eyes to the circle of hills that hemmed in the little town rising steeply from  beyond the last row of houses and the irregular  patchwork of little fields. They were oddly shaped hills, rolling range beyond range, higher  and higher until, far in the distance there loomed