e there any breaking-downs within her--there
was only a calm faith that staggered him and gave him an ever-mounting
sense of his responsibility for whatever might, through the part he had
taken in moulding her life, be in store for her.

When he was not there, life grew a little easier for her in time,
because of her dreams, the patience that was built from them and Hale's
kindly words, the comfort of her garden and her books, and the blessed
force of habit. For as time went on, she got consciously used to the
rough life, the coarse food and the rude ways of her own people and
her own home. And though she relaxed not a bit in her own dainty
cleanliness, the shrinking that she felt when she first arrived home,
came to her at longer and longer intervals. Once a week she went down
to Uncle Billy's, where she watched the water-wheel dripping sun-jewels
into the sluice, the kingfisher darting like a blue bolt upon his prey,
and listening to the lullaby that the water played to the sleepy old
mill--and stopping, both ways, to gossip with old Hon in her porch under
the honeysuckle vines. Uncle Billy saw the change in her and he grew
vaguely uneasy about her--she dreamed so much, she was at times so
restless, she asked so many questions he could not answer, and she
failed to ask so many that were on the tip of her tongue. He saw that
while her body was at home, her thoughts rarely were; and it all haunted
him with a vague sense that he was losing her. But old Hon laughed at
him and told him he was an old fool and to "git another pair o' specs"
and maybe he could see that the "little gal" was in love. This startled
Uncle Billy, for he was so like a father to June that he was as slow
as a father in recognizing that his child has grown to such absurd
maturity. But looking back to the beginning--how the little girl had
talked of the "furriner" who had come into Lonesome Cove all during
the six months he was gone; how gladly she had gone away to the Gap
to school, how anxious she was to go still farther away again, and,
remembering all the strange questions she asked him about things in the
outside world of which he knew nothing--Uncle Billy shook his head in
confirmation of his own conclusion, and with all his soul he wondered
about Hale--what kind of a man he was and what his purpose was with
June--and of every man who passed his mill he never failed to ask if he
knew "that ar man Hale" and what he knew. All he had heard had been i