among the people, and their life had
been his life. But his heart was not in his work. He wanted to go
beyond the hills and seek what he knew must be there. The valley was
too narrow, too placid. He longed for conflict and accomplishment. He
felt power and desire and the lust of endeavour stirring in him. Oh,
to go over the hills to a world where men lived! Such had been the
goal of all his dreams.

When his mother died he sold the farm to his cousin, Stephen Marshall.
He supposed it still belonged to him. Stephen had been a good sort of
a fellow, a bit slow and plodding, perhaps, bovinely content to dwell
within the hills, never hearkening or responding to the lure of the
beyond. Yet it might be he had chosen the better part, to dwell thus
on the land of his fathers, with a wife won in youth, and children to
grow up around him. The childless, wifeless man looking down from the
hill wondered if it might have been so with him had he been content to
stay in the valley. Perhaps so. There had been Joyce.

He wondered where Joyce was now and whom she had married, for of
course she had married. Did she too live somewhere down there in the
valley, the matronly, contented mother of lads and lassies? He could
see her old home also, not so far from his own, just across a green
meadow by way of a footpath and stile and through the firs beyond it.
How often he had traversed that path in the old days, knowing that
Joyce would be waiting at the end of it among the firs--Joyce, the
playmate of childhood, the sweet confidante and companion of youth!
They had never been avowed lovers, but he had loved her then, as a boy
loves, although he had never said a word of love to her. Joyce alone
knew of his longings and his ambitions and his dreams; he had told
them all to her freely, sure of the understanding and sympathy no
other soul in the valley could give him. How true and strong and
womanly and gentle she had always been!

When he left home he had meant to go back to her some day. They had
parted without pledge or kiss, yet he knew she loved him and that he
loved her. At first they corresponded, then the letters began to grow
fewer. It was his fault; he had gradually forgotten. The new, fierce,
burning interests that came into his life crowded the old ones out.
Boyhood's love was scorched up in that hot flame of ambition and
contest. He had not heard from or of Joyce for many years. Now, again,
he remembered as he looked down on the