as he made his way toward Poplar
Hill, and he would stop under the beeches and listen with ears of
growing love to the wonder of it all. For it was he who was the ardent
one of the two now.

June was no longer the frank, impulsive child who stood at the foot of
the beech, doggedly reckless if all the world knew her love for him. She
had taken flight to some inner recess where it was difficult for Hale to
follow, and right puzzled he was to discover that he must now win again
what, unasked, she had once so freely given.

Bob Berkley, too, had developed amazingly. He no longer said "Sir" to
Hale--that was bad form at Harvard--he called him by his first name and
looked him in the eye as man to man: just as June--Hale observed--no
longer seemed in any awe of Miss Anne Saunders and to have lost all
jealousy of her, or of anybody else--so swiftly had her instinct taught
her she now had nothing to fear. And Bob and June seemed mightily
pleased with each other, and sometimes Hale, watching them as they
galloped past him on horseback laughing and bantering, felt foolish
to think of their perfect fitness--the one for the other--and the
incongruity of himself in a relationship that would so naturally be
theirs. At one thing he wondered: she had made an extraordinary
record at school and it seemed to him that it was partly through the
consciousness that her brain would take care of itself that she could
pay such heed to what hitherto she had had no chance to learn--dress,
manners, deportment and speech. Indeed, it was curious that she seemed
to lay most stress on the very things to which he, because of his long
rough life in the mountains, was growing more and more indifferent.
It was quite plain that Bob, with his extreme gallantry of manner,
his smart clothes, his high ways and his unconquerable gayety, had
supplanted him on the pedestal where he had been the year before, just
as somebody, somewhere--his sister, perhaps--had supplanted Miss Anne.
Several times indeed June had corrected Hale's slips of tongue with
mischievous triumph, and once when he came back late from a long trip in
the mountains and walked in to dinner without changing his clothes,
Hale saw her look from himself to the immaculate Bob with an unconscious
comparison that half amused, half worried him. The truth was he was
building a lovely Frankenstein and from wondering what he was going to
do with it, he was beginning to wonder now what it might some day
do