at the barrel-spring, Tom went afield
again, this time to gather plunging courage for the confession to his
mother--a thing which, after so many postponements, could be put off no
longer.

It was more instinct than purpose that led him to avoid the mountain.
Thinking only of the crying need for solitude, he crossed the pike and
the creek and rambled aimlessly for an hour or more over that farther
hill ground beyond the country-house colony where he had once tried to
break the Dabney spirit in a weary, bedraggled little girl with
colorless lips and saucer-like eyes.

When he recrossed the stream, at a point some distance above the
boy-time perch pools, the serving foot-log chanced to be that used by
the Little Zoar folk coming from beyond the boundary hills. Following
the windings of the path he presently came out in the rear of the
weather-beaten, wooden-shuttered church standing, blind-eyed and silent,
in week-day desertion in the midst of its groving of pines.

The spot was rife with memories, and Tom passed around the building to
the front, treading softly as on hallowed ground. Whatever the future
might hold for him, there would always be heart-stirring recollections
to cluster about this frail old building sheltered by the whispering
pines.

How many times he had sat on the steps in the door-opening days of
boyhood, looking out across the dusty pike and up to the opposing steeps
of Lebanon lifting the eastward horizon half-way to the zenith!
Leg-weariness, and a sudden desire to live over again thus much of the
past turning him aside, he went to sit on the highest of the three
steps, with the brooding silence for company and the uplifted landscape
to revamp the boyhood memories.

The sun had set for Paradise Valley, but his parting rays were still
volleying in level lines against the great gray cliffs at the top of
Lebanon, silvering the bare sandstone, blackening the cedars and pines
by contrast, and making a fine-lined tracery, blue on gray, of the twigs
and leafless branches of the deciduous trees. Off to the left a touch of
sepia on the sky-line marked the chimneys of Crestcliffe Inn, and
farther around, and happily almost hidden by the shouldering of the
hills, a grayer cloud hung over the industries at Gordonia.

Nearer at hand were the wooded slopes of the Dabney lands--lordly
forests culled and cared for through three generations of land-lovers
until now their groves of oaks and hickories, tulip-tre