type."

"He's down here now, keeping quiet. How long it will last, no one knows.
Justice is lax in the mountains. His father shot three or four men
before he died himself of a gunshot wound which he received while
resisting the officers of the law. If there's a man left in the family
to follow this thing up, Frale will be hunted down and arrested or shot;
otherwise, when things have cooled off a little up there, he will go
back and open up the old business, and the tragedy will be repeated.
James, you know how often after the best you could do and all their
promises, they go back to it?"

"I admit it's always a question. They don't seem to be content in the
low country. I think it is often a sort of natural gravitation back to
the mountains where they were born and bred, more than it is depravity."

"I know, James, but that excuse won't help Cassandra."

"Why did she do it?" asked David. "She must have known to what such a
marriage would bring her."

"Do it? That is the sort of girl she is. If she thought she ought, she
would leap over that fall there."

"But why should she think she ought? Had she given her--promise--" David
saw her as she appeared to him when she had said that word to him on the
mountain, and it silenced him, but only for a moment. He would learn all
he could of her motives now. He must--he would know. "I mean before he
did this, before she went away to study--had she made him such
a--promise?"

"No. You tell him about it, James. You have seen her and talked with
her. They were quarrelling about her, as I understand, and she thinks
because she was the cause of the deed she must help him make
retribution. Isn't that it, James? She knows perfectly well what it
means for her, for she has had her aspirations. I can see it all. Frale
says he was not drunk nor his friend either. He says the other man
claimed--but I won't go into that--only Cassandra promised him before
God, he says, that if he would repent, she would marry him. And when she
was here she used to talk about the way those women live. How her own
mother has worked and aged! Why, she is not yet sixty. You have seen how
they live in their wretched little cabins, Doctor; that's what Frale
would doom her to. He never in life will understand her. He'll grow old
like his father,--a passionate, ignorant, untamed animal, and worse, for
he would be drunken as well. He's been drunk twice since he came down
here. James, you know they think it's p