in--not until I've finished them, and I wear them--for you."

With head still bowed she walked before him to the open door. But
there on the threshold she stopped and flashed up at him her
whimsically provocating smile.

"Tell me--why don't you tell me, Denny," she commanded imperiously,
"that I'm prettier than all the others--even if I haven't the pretty
clothes!"

When the ridges to the east were tinged with the red of a rising sun,
Denny Bolton was still sitting, head propped in his hands, at the
table before the window, totally oblivious to the smoking lamp beside
him, or to anything else save the square card which he had found lying
there beneath the table after he had taken her back across the valley
to John Anderson's once-white cottage. He rose and extinguished the
smoking wick as the first light of day began to creep through the
room.

"---- requests the pleasure of Miss Dryad Anderson's company," he
repeated aloud. And then, as he turned to the open door and the work
that was waiting for him, in a voice that even he himself had never
before heard pass his lips:

"And she could have gone--she could have, and she didn't--just
because----"

His grave voice drifted off into silence. As if it were a perishably
precious thing, he slipped the square card within its envelope and
buttoned the whole within his coat.

CHAPTER V

As far back as he could remember Denny could not recall a single day
when Old Jerry had swung up the long hill road that led to his
lonesome farmhouse on the ridge at a pace any faster than a crawling
walk. Nor could he recollect, either, a single instance when he had
chanced to arrive at that last stop upon the route much before dark.

And yet it was still a good two hours before sundown; only a few
minutes before he had driven his heavy steaming team in from the
fields and turned toward the ladder that mounted to the hayloft, when
the familiar shrill complaint of ungreased axles drifted up to him
from the valley.

With a foot upon the first rung Young Denny paused, scowling in mild
perplexity. He had crossed the next moment to the open double doors,
as the sound floated up to him in a steadily increasing volume, and
was standing, his big body huge in its flannel shirt, open at the
throat, and high boots laced to the knees, leaning loosely at ease
against the door frame, when the dingy rig with its curtains flapping
crazily in the wind lurched around the bend in the road an