her breath sharply as she turned away. And brooding he
walked the woods long that night.

Only a few days later, they started for New York and, with all her
dreaming, June had never dreamed that the world could be so large.
Mountains and vast stretches of rolling hills and level land melted
away from her wondering eyes; towns and cities sank behind them, swift
streams swollen by freshets were outstripped and left behind, darkness
came on and, through it, they still sped on. Once during the night she
woke from a troubled dream in her berth and for a moment she thought she
was at home again. They were running through mountains again and there
they lay in the moonlight, the great calm dark faces that she knew and
loved, and she seemed to catch the odour of the earth and feel the cool
air on her face, but there was no pang of homesickness now--she was too
eager for the world into which she was going. Next morning the air was
cooler, the skies lower and grayer--the big city was close at hand. Then
came the water, shaking and sparkling in the early light like a great
cauldron of quicksilver, and the wonderful Brooklyn Bridge--a ribbon of
twinkling lights tossed out through the mist from the mighty city that
rose from that mist as from a fantastic dream; then the picking of a
way through screeching little boats and noiseless big ones and white
bird-like floating things and then they disappeared like two tiny grains
in a shifting human tide of sand. But Hale was happy now, for on that
trip June had come back to herself, and to him, once more--and now, awed
but unafraid, eager, bubbling, uplooking, full of quaint questions
about everything she saw, she was once more sitting with affectionate
reverence at his feet. When he left her in a great low house that
fronted on the majestic Hudson, June clung to him with tears and of her
own accord kissed him for the first time since she had torn her little
playhouse to pieces at the foot of the beech down in the mountains far
away. And Hale went back with peace in his heart, but to trouble in the
hills.

* * * * * * *

Not suddenly did the boom drop down there, not like a falling star,
but on the wings of hope--wings that ever fluttering upward, yet sank
inexorably and slowly closed. The first crash came over the waters when
certain big men over there went to pieces--men on whose shoulders rested
the colossal figure of progress that the English were carving