a-hidin' out from
nobody."

She was standing with the waxen green of the laurel breaking into pink
flower-foam at her back and through the oak and poplar branches showed
scraps of blue sky--the blue of June.

A catch came into Turner's voice and he said somewhat huskily, "When
they christened ye Blossom they didn't misname ye none."

Blossom, he thought, was like a wild-rose growing among sun-flowers.
When the evening star came up luminous and dewy-fresh over the
darkening peaks, while twilight still lingered at the edges of the
world, he always thought of her.

But the charm was not all in his own eye: not all the magic endowment
of first love. The mountain preacher's daughter had escaped those
slovenly habits of backwoods life that inevitably coarsen. Her beauty
had slender strength and flower freshness.

Now she stood holding with one hand to the gnarled branch of a dogwood
sapling. A blue sunbonnet falling back from her head left the abundance
of her hair bared to the light so that it shimmered between brown and
gold.

She was perhaps sixteen and her heavily lashed eyes were brownish amber
and just now full of a mirthful sparkle.

"Ye seemed ter be studyin' about somethin' almighty hard," she insisted
teasingly. "I thought for a minute that mebbe ye'd done growed thar."

Turner Stacy smiled again as he looked at her. In his eyes was unveiled
and honest worship.

"I was a'studyin' about you, Blossom. I don't know no way ter do that
save almighty hard. Didn't ye hear me whoop?"

The girl's head nodded.

"Why didn't ye answer me?"

"I aimed ter slip up on ye, if I could, Turner, but I didn't low it
would be so plumb easy.--You made believe that yore ears could hear the
grass a-growin'."

The youth took a sudden step toward her and stood close, so close that
her breath touched his face fragrantly as she looked up with a witching
mockery in her eyes. His heart fluttered with the clamor of impulse to
seize her in his arms, but his half-lifted hands dropped to his sides.

He was not quite twenty-one and she was only sixteen, and the code of
the mountains is strict with the simplicity of the pioneer. A woman
gives her lips in betrothal or, giving them lightly, drops to the caste
of a light woman.

So the boy drew back with a resolute jerk of his head.

"I was a-studyin' erbout some day, Blossom," he said, "when thar's
a-goin' ter be a dwellin'-house down thar. Not a house of warped
timbers whar the ha