overjoyed him to give the
choicest dusters he found into her slim, waxen little fingers, and
watch her eyes grow round with pleasure in them. When the sun began to
lower over the beeches she had gone home with her arms full of
arbutus, but she had turned at the edge of the pineland and waved her
hand at him.

That night, when he told his mother of the little girl he had met on
the hill, she had hoped anxiously that he had been "very polite," for
the little girl was a daughter of Colonel Stuart, newly come to
Pinehurst. Jeffrey, reflecting, had not been certain that he had been
polite; "But I am sure she liked me," he said gravely.

A few days later a message came from Mrs. Stuart on the hill to Mrs.
Miller in the valley. Would she let her little boy go up now and then
to play with Sara? Sara was very lonely because she had no playmates.
So Jeff, overjoyed, had gone to his divinity's very home, where the
two children played together many a day. All through their childhood
they had been fast friends. Sara's parents placed no bar to their
intimacy. They had soon concluded that little Jeff Miller was a very
good playmate for Sara. He was gentle, well-behaved, and manly.

Sara never went to the district school which Jeff attended; she had
her governess at home. With no other boy or girl in Bayside did she
form any friendship, but her loyalty to Jeff never wavered. As for
Jeff, he worshipped her and would have done anything she commanded. He
belonged to her from the day they had hunted arbutus on the hill.

When Sara was fifteen she had gone away to school. Jeff had missed her
sorely. For four years he saw her only in the summers, and each year
she had seemed taller, statelier, further from him. When she graduated
her father took her abroad for two years; then she came home, a
lovely, high-bred girl, dimpling on the threshold of womanhood; and
Jeffrey Miller was face to face with two bitter facts. One was that he
loved her--not with the boy-and-girl love of long ago, but with the
love of a man for the one woman in the world; and the other was that
she was as far beyond his reach as one of those sunset stars of which
she had always reminded him in her pure, clear-shining loveliness.

He looked these facts unflinchingly in the face until he had grown
used to them, and then he laid down his course for himself. He loved
Sara--and he did not wish to conquer his love, even if it had been
possible. It were better to love her, w