Big Tom was conscious that he had become primitive and patriarchal also,
though the truth was that he had always been primitive.

As he sat on the embowered porch of his house in the evening and thought
things over, while the two young voices murmured near him, his
reflections were not greatly joyful. The years he had spent closed in by
the mountains and surrounded by his simple neighbours had been full of
peace. Since Sheba had belonged to him they had even held more than
peace. The end had been that the lonely unhappiness of his youth had
seemed a thing so far away that it was rather like a dream. Only Delia
Vanuxem was not quite like a dream. Her pitying girlish face and the
liquid darkness of her uplifted eyes always came back to him clearly when
he called them up in thought. He called them up often during these days
in which he was pondering as to what it was best to decide to do.

"It's the boy who brings her back so," he told himself. "Good Lord, how
near she seems! The grass has been growing over her for many a year, and
I'm an old fellow, but she looks just as she did then."

The world beyond the mountains did not allure him. It was easier to sit
and see the sun rise and set within the purple boundary than to face life
where it was less simple, and perhaps less kindly. It was from a much
less advanced and concentrated civilisation he had fled in his youth, and
the years which had passed had not made him more fitted to combat with
what was more complex.

"Trading for butter and eggs over the counter of a country store, and
discussing Doty's corn crop and Hayworth's pigs hasn't done anything
particular towards fitting me to shine in society," he said. "It suits
_me_ well enough, but it's not what's wanted at a ball or a cabinet
minister's reception." And he shook his head. "I'd rather stay where I
am--a darned sight."

But the murmuring voices went on near him, and little bursts of laughter
rang out, or two figures wandered about the garden, and his thoughts
always came back to one point--a point where the sun seemed to shine on
things and surround them with a dazzling radiance.

"Yes, it's all very well for _me_," he concluded more than once. "It's
well enough for _me_ to sit down and spend the rest of my life looking at
the mountains and watching summer change into winter; but they are only
beginning it all--just beginning."

So one night he left his chair and went out and walked between them in
the moon