a long
time and she was panting when she reached it. There was the scattered
playhouse--it might have lain there untouched for a quarter of a
century--just as her angry feet had kicked it to pieces. On a root of
the beech she sat down and the broad rim of her hat scratched the trunk
of it and annoyed her, so she took it off and leaned her head against
the tree, looking up into the underworld of leaves through which
a sunbeam filtered here and there--one striking her hair which had
darkened to a duller gold--striking it eagerly, unerringly, as though
it had started for just such a shining mark. Below her was outspread
the little town--the straggling, wretched little town--crude, lonely,
lifeless! She could not be happy in Lonesome Cove after she had known
the Gap, and now her horizon had so broadened that she felt now toward
the Gap and its people as she had then felt toward the mountaineers: for
the standards of living in the Cove--so it seemed--were no farther
below the standards in the Gap than they in turn were lower than the new
standards to which she had adapted herself while away. Indeed, even that
Bluegrass world where she had spent a year was too narrow now for her
vaulting ambition, and with that thought she looked down again on the
little town, a lonely island in a sea of mountains and as far from
the world for which she had been training herself as though it were in
mid-ocean. Live down there? She shuddered at the thought and straightway
was very miserable. The clear piping of a wood-thrush rose far away, a
tear started between her half-closed lashes and she might have gone to
weeping silently, had her ear not caught the sound of something moving
below her. Some one was coming that way, so she brushed her eyes swiftly
with her handkerchief and stood upright against the tree. And there
again Hale found her, tense, upright, bareheaded again and her hands
behind her; only her face was not uplifted and dreaming--it was turned
toward him, unstartled and expectant. He stopped below her and leaned
one shoulder against a tree.

"I saw you pass the office," he said, "and I thought I should find you
here."

His eyes dropped to the scattered playhouse of long ago--and a faint
smile that was full of submerged sadness passed over his face. It was
his playhouse, after all, that she had kicked to pieces. But he did not
mention it--nor her attitude--nor did he try, in any way, to arouse her
memories of that other time at