le creature's eyes, and when those eyes met the teacher's, always
June's hand would wander unconsciously to the little cross at her throat
as though to invoke its aid against anything that could come between her
and its giver.

The purple rhododendrons on Bee Rock had come and gone and the
pink-flecked laurels were in bloom when June fared forth one sunny
morning of her own birth-month behind old Judd Tolliver--home. Back up
through the wild Gap they rode in silence, past Bee Rock, out of the
chasm and up the little valley toward the Trail of the Lonesome Pine,
into which the father's old sorrel nag, with a switch of her sunburnt
tail, turned leftward. June leaned forward a little, and there was the
crest of the big tree motionless in the blue high above, and sheltered
by one big white cloud. It was the first time she had seen the pine
since she had first left it, and little tremblings went through her from
her bare feet to her bonneted head. Thus was she unclad, for Hale had
told her that, to avoid criticism, she must go home clothed just as she
was when she left Lonesome Cove. She did not quite understand that, and
she carried her new clothes in a bundle in her lap, but she took Hale's
word unquestioned. So she wore her crimson homespun and her bonnet, with
her bronze-gold hair gathered under it in the same old Psyche knot.
She must wear her shoes, she told Hale, until she got out of town, else
someone might see her, but Hale had said she would be leaving too early
for that: and so she had gone from the Gap as she had come into it, with
unmittened hands and bare feet. The soft wind was very good to those
dangling feet, and she itched to have them on the green grass or in the
cool waters through which the old horse splashed. Yes, she was going
home again, the same June as far as mountain eyes could see, though she
had grown perceptibly, and her little face had blossomed from her heart
almost into a woman's, but she knew that while her clothes were the
same, they covered quite another girl. Time wings slowly for the young,
and when the sensations are many and the experiences are new, slowly
even for all--and thus there was a double reason why it seemed an age to
June since her eyes had last rested on the big Pine.

Here was the place where Hale had put his big black horse into a dead
run, and as vivid a thrill of it came back to her now as had been the
thrill of the race. Then they began to climb laboriously up the rock