ouches, and gazed at them with an expression of
picturesquely avaricious joy. Had any witnessed this procedure they
would have found it vastly puzzling, for the specimens seemed merely
small, black stones and valueless. But once, while looking at them
lovingly, he burst into a harsh and hearty laugh as of great triumph,
quite involuntarily; but hushed it quickly, looking, then, about him
with an apprehensive glance. Each step he made was, in the main, a
cautious one, each pause he made was plainly to look at some familiar,
if some slightly altered, vista.

It was quite clear that with the finding of the little bits of rock he
had achieved the errand which had brought him to the mountains, and that
now he roamed to satisfy his memory's curiosity. Smiles of recognition
constantly played upon his grim and grizzled face at sight of some old
path, some distant, mist-enshrouded crag, even some mighty pine or oak
which had for years withstood the buffeting of tempestuous storms; now
and then a little puzzled frown, added its wrinkles to the many which
already creased his brow, when, at some spot which he had thought to
find as he had left it, long ago, he discovered that time's changes had
been notable.

Once only did the man become confused among the woods-paths (where a
stranger might have lost himself quite hopelessly in twenty minutes) and
that was at a point not far from where Madge Brierly and Layson had, on
their way up from the clearing, paused while she told her youthful
escort of the grim but simple tragedy of her feud-darkened childhood.
Before the old man reached this spot he had been traveling with puzzled
caution, for a time, across a slope rough-scarred by some not ancient
landslide which had changed the superficial contour of the
mountain-side. When, suddenly, he debouched upon the rocky crag, hung, a
rustic, natural platform above a gorgeous panorama of the valley, the
view came to him, evidently, as a sharp, a startling, most unpleasant
shock.

That the place was quite familiar to him none who watched him would have
doubted, but no smiles of pleasant memories curved his thin, unpleasant
lips as he surveyed it. He did not pause there, happily, communing with
his memory in smiling reminiscence as he had at other points along the
way. Instead, as the great view burst upon his gaze, he started back as
if the outlook almost terrified him. He had been traveling astoop,
partly because the burden of his years weig