deliver it. One moment of sadness
on her part would have been sufficient excuse. If he could have
surprised her just once gazing at him from moist, questioning eyes, he
felt that that would have been enough proof of contrition and humble
meekness of spirit on her part. But he never did.

Instead Old Jerry had never seen so astounding a change take place in
any human being as that which came over her day by day. By the end of
that first week the pallor had gone entirely from her cheeks. The deep
dark circles which had rimmed the wet eyes which she had lifted to him
that first morning disappeared so entirely that it was hard to
remember that they had ever been there at all. Even the lithely
slender body seemed fuller, rounder. To every outward appearance at
least Old Jerry had to confess to himself that he had never seen a
more supremely contented, thoroughly happy creature than Dryad
Anderson was at that week's end.

And it irritated him; it almost angered him at times. Remembering his
own travail of spirit, the self-inflicted agony of mind which he had
undergone that day when he had first looked square into the eyes of
his own soul and acknowledge his years of guilty unfairness to the
lonely boy on the hill, he shut his lips tight upon the message he
might have delivered and waited, stubbornly, for her to show some sign
of repentance.

For a day or two a mental contemplation of this necessarily severe
course brought him moments of comparative peace of mind. It justified
in a measure, at least, his own remissness, and yet even that
mind-state at times was rudely shaken. At each day's end, after he had
made his reluctant ascent of the hill which led up to Young Denny's
unlighted house, and a far speedier, none too dignified return, the
little driver of the squealing buggy made it a point to turn off and
stop for a moment or two before the gate of John Anderson's cottage.
At first the girl's real need of him prompted this daily detour; then,
when the actual need no longer existed, he excused the visit on the
plea of her lonesomeness and his promise to Denny to look after her.

His own loneliness--for he had never been so lonely before in all his
lonely life--and the other and real reason for this habit, he never
allowed himself to scrutinize too closely. But each day he sat a
little forward on the buggy seat as soon as he had turned the last
sharp curve in the road and stared eagerly ahead through the afternoon
dusk