of how lonesome would be the trail that would be his to follow after
that day.

XXIII

June, tired though she was, tossed restlessly that night. The one look
she had seen in Hale's face when she met him in the car, told her the
truth as far as he was concerned. He was unchanged, she could give him
no chance to withdraw from their long understanding, for it was plain
to her quick instinct that he wanted none. And so she had asked him
no question about his failure to meet her, for she knew now that his
reason, no matter what, was good. He had startled her in the car, for
her mind was heavy with memories of the poor little cabins she had
passed on the train, of the mountain men and women in the wedding-party,
and Hale himself was to the eye so much like one of them--had so
startled her that, though she knew that his instinct, too, was at work,
she could not gather herself together to combat her own feelings, for
every little happening in the dummy but drew her back to her previous
train of painful thought. And in that helplessness she had told Hale
good-night. She remembered now how she had looked upon Lonesome Cove
after she went to the Gap; how she had looked upon the Gap after her
year in the Bluegrass, and how she had looked back even on the first big
city she had seen there from the lofty vantage ground of New York. What
was the use of it all? Why laboriously climb a hill merely to see and
yearn for things that you cannot have, if you must go back and live in
the hollow again? Well, she thought rebelliously, she would not go back
to the hollow again--that was all. She knew what was coming and her
cousin Dave's perpetual sneer sprang suddenly from the past to cut
through her again and the old pride rose within her once more. She was
good enough now for Hale, oh, yes, she thought bitterly, good enough
NOW; and then, remembering his life-long kindness and thinking what she
might have been but for him, she burst into tears at the unworthiness of
her own thought. Ah, what should she do--what should she do? Repeating
that question over and over again, she fell toward morning into troubled
sleep. She did not wake until nearly noon, for already she had formed
the habit of sleeping late--late at least, for that part of the
world--and she was glad when the negro boy brought her word that Mr.
Hale had been called up the valley and would not be back until the
afternoon. She dreaded to meet him, for she knew that he had