y
creek--the water singing a joyous welcome to her along the path, ferns
and flowers nodding to her from dead leaves and rich mould and peeping
at her from crevices between the rocks on the creek-banks as high up as
the level of her eyes--up under bending branches full-leafed, with the
warm sunshine darting down through them upon her as she passed, and
making a playfellow of her sunny hair. Here was the place where she had
got angry with Hale, had slid from his horse and stormed with tears.
What a little fool she had been when Hale had meant only to be kind! He
was never anything but kind--Jack was--dear, dear Jack! That wouldn't
happen NO more, she thought, and straightway she corrected that thought.

"It won't happen ANY more," she said aloud.

"Whut'd you say, June?"

The old man lifted his bushy beard from his chest and turned his head.

"Nothin', dad," she said, and old Judd, himself in a deep study, dropped
back into it again. How often she had said that to herself--that it
would happen no more--she had stopped saying it to Hale, because he
laughed and forgave her, and seemed to love her mood, whether she cried
from joy or anger--and yet she kept on doing both just the same.

Several times Devil Judd stopped to let his horse rest, and each time,
of course, the wooded slopes of the mountains stretched downward in
longer sweeps of summer green, and across the widening valley the tops
of the mountains beyond dropped nearer to the straight level of her
eyes, while beyond them vaster blue bulks became visible and ran on and
on, as they always seemed, to the farthest limits of the world. Even
out there, Hale had told her, she would go some day. The last curving
up-sweep came finally, and there stood the big Pine, majestic, unchanged
and murmuring in the wind like the undertone of a far-off sea. As they
passed the base of it, she reached out her hand and let the tips of her
fingers brush caressingly across its trunk, turned quickly for a last
look at the sunlit valley and the hills of the outer world and then the
two passed into a green gloom of shadow and thick leaves that shut her
heart in as suddenly as though some human hand had clutched it. She was
going home--to see Bub and Loretta and Uncle Billy and "old Hon" and her
step-mother and Dave, and yet she felt vaguely troubled. The valley on
the other side was in dazzling sunshine--she had seen that. The sun must
still be shining over there--it must be shining abo