mpass. It must cease, she must know
the truth at whatever cost. He broke through the hedge and stood in the
flicker of the moonlight before her, pale, agitated, all unlike his
wonted self.

She did not hear, amid the tumult of her weeping, the rustling of the
boughs, but some subtle sense took cognizance of his presence. She half
rose, and with one hand holding back her dense yellow hair, which had
fallen forward on her forehead, she looked up at him fearfully,
tremulously, with all the revolt of the corporeal creature for the
essence of the mysterious incorporeal. For a moment he could not speak.
So much he must needs explain. The next instant he was whelmed in the
avalanche of her words.

[Illustration: WITH ONE HAND HOLDING BACK HER DENSE YELLOW HAIR ... SHE
LOOKED UP AT HIM]

"Ye hev kem!" she exclaimed in a sort of shrill ecstasy. "Ye hev kem so
far ter hear the word that I would give my life ter hev said before. Ye
knowed it in heaven! An' how like ye ter kem ter gin me the chanst ter
say it at last! How like the good heart of ye, worth all the hearts on
yearth--an' _buried hyar_!"

With her open palm she smote the insensate clods with a gesture of
despair. Then she went on in a rising tide of tumultuous emotion. "I
love ye! Oh, I _always_ loved ye! I never keered fur nobody else! An' I
war tongue-tied, an' full of fool pride, an' faultin' ye fur yer ways;
an' I wouldn't gin ye the word I knowed ye war wantin' ter hear. But now
I kin tell the pore ghost of ye--I kin tell the pore, pore ghost!"

She buried her swollen, tear-stained face in her hands, and shook her
head to and fro with the realization of the futility of late repentance.
As she once more lifted her eyes, she was obviously surprised to see him
still standing there, and the crisis seemed to restore to him the
faculty of speech.

"Minta Elladine," he said huskily and prosaically, "I ain't dead!"

She sprang to her feet and stood gazing at him, intent and quivering.

"I be truly alive an' kickin', an' ez worthless ez ever," he went on.

She said not a word, but bent and pallid, and, quaking in every muscle,
stood peering beneath her hand, which still held back her hair.

"It's all a mistake," he urged. "This ain't no grave. The top war dug a
leetle ter turn off a revenuer's suspicions o' the moonshiners. They put
that tale out."

Still, evidently on the verge of collapse, she did not speak.

"Ye needn't be afeared ez I be goin' ter take fur