own by
Dick's anxious attentions, had actually gone. Once in the train on the
way into the uplands where Wake Hill lies, he reflected, with a smile,
that Dick had really helped him inconceivably in this matter of haste.
He might have loitered along, dallying with the wisdom of going, and
possibly ended by not going at all. But Dick's insistence on formulating
the situation, his neatness and energy in getting all the emotions of
the case into their proper pigeon holes, had so harassed and then bored
him that he had worked like a beaver, he told himself, to get off and
escape them altogether. And not a word from Amelia, either to his
telegram or Dick's letter. Things were looking up. It might be Amelia
had been elected to some new and absorbing organization for putting the
social edifice still more irretrievably into the disorder it seemed bent
for, in which case she might forget the inner wobblings of such an
inconspicuous nomad as a brother in metaphysical pangs. He became
recklessly optimistic, as the train climbed higher into the hills, and
luxuriated in it, conscious all the time that it was altitude that was
intoxicating him, not any real hope of hoodwinking Amelia. You couldn't
do that so easily.

The first glimpse of a far-away mountain brought the surprising tears to
his eyes. It was an inconsiderable ridge with an outline of no
distinction, but it had the old charm, the power of clutching at his
heart and dragging it up from the glories and sorrows of the sea. Raven
always insisted that he loved the sea best, with its terrors and
multitudinous activities; but the mountains did pull him up somewhere
into a region he did not inhabit all the time. He had an idea that this
was simply a plane of physical exhilaration; but it didn't matter. It
was an easement of a sort, if only the difference of change. When he
stepped out of the train at Wake Hill he was in a tranquil frame of
mind, and the more the minute he saw Jerry Slate there in the pung,
enveloped in the buffalo coat he had worn through the winter months ever
since he attained his present height. Jerry was a typical man of Wake
Hill. He was ten years, at least, older than Raven and had lived here,
man and boy, all his life, and his wife, Charlotte, was the presiding
benevolence of the Raven home. Seeing his passenger, he lifted his
whip-stock in salute and stepped out of the pung to meet him. Jerry was
yellow and freckled and blue-eyed, with a face, Raven alway