to him, he had been, to her, both father and mother.
Spasmodically her hands clenched and unclenched, and her fingers dug
wildly into the earth.

Brent turned away and left her there and it was a full two hours later
before he met her and led her, passive enough now, to a place from
which they overlooked that river that, not long ago, they had ridden
together. Under his gently diplomatic prompting she found relief in
unbosoming herself.

"He war all I hed----" she rebelliously declared. "An' whilst he lived
thet war enough--but now I hain't got nothin' left."

After a little she broke out again. "I hain't a woman--an' hain't a
man. I hain't nuthin'."

"Alexander," said Brent gently, "when I looked at your father's face in
there, I was thinking of what Parson Acup once told me. He said that
if your father had been a wishful man,"--he used the hill phrase for
ambition quite unconsciously, "he could have gone to the Legislature.
Perhaps to Congress."

"I reckon he mout ef hed any honors he craved," she replied. "Folks
was always pesterin' him ter run fer office."

The man looked off across the valley which was so desolate now and
which would soon be so tenderly green; so tuneful with leaf and blossom.

His eyes were seeing a vision and some of it he tried to voice.

"Suppose, Alexander, he _had_ gone. Suppose he had taken his seat in
Congress, instead of staying here. He would have become a figure
trusted there, too--but how different your life would have been. There
would have been schools and--well, many things that you have never
known."

"I hain't hankerin' fer none of them things," she said. Then with a
sudden paroxysm of sobs that shook her afresh, she added, "All I wants
is ter hev him back ergin!"

But Brent was thinking of things that could mean little to her because
she lacked the background of contrast and comparison. He was seeing
that beauty and that personality in the social life of official
Washington; seeing the triumph that would have been hers--and wondering
what it would have meant to her in the balance of contentment or
unhappiness.

Of course had Aaron McGivins begun his political career young enough,
every trace of mountain illiteracy would long ago have been shed away
by the growing girl. As for her blood, there is in all America no
other so purely Anglo-Saxon.

"I rather think it's a pity he didn't go," Brent mused aloud. Then he
added, "Now that he's--not with you any