As tree whispers unto tree, as flower yearns to
flower, so came the mandate to his being in that undying speech that
knows no change from the beginning to the end of time.

Against this overwhelming desire of an impetuous love there was raised
but one barrier--the enduring resistance of a woman's will, silent, not
strenuous, unprotesting, but unchanged. To all his renewed pleadings
the girl said simply that she had no heart to give, that her hope of
happiness lay buried on the field of Louisburg, in the far-off land
that she had known in younger and less troubled days. Leaving that
land, orphaned, penniless, her life crushed down at the very portal of
womanhood, her friends scattered, her family broken and destroyed, her
whole world overturned, she had left also all hope of a later
happiness. There remained to her only the memory of a past, the honour
that she prized, the traditions which she must maintain. She was
"unreconstructed," as she admitted bitterly. Moreover, so she said,
even could it lie in her heart ever to prove unfaithful to her lover
who had died upon the field of duty, never could it happen that she
would care for one of those who had murdered him, who had murdered her
happiness, who had ruined her home, destroyed her people, and banished
her in this far wandering from the land that bore her.

"Providence did not bring me here to marry you," she said to Franklin
keenly, "but to tell you that I would never marry you--never, not even
though I loved you, as I do not. I am still a Southerner, am still a
'rebel.' Moreover, I have learned my lesson. I shall never love
again."

CHAPTER XIX

THAT WHICH HE WOULD

Poor medicine as it is, work was ever the best salve known for a
hurting heart. Franklin betook him to his daily work, and he saw
success attend his labours. Already against the frank barbarity of the
cattle days there began to push the hand of the "law-and-order"
element, steadily increasing in power. Although all the primitive
savage in him answered to the summons of those white-hot days to every
virile, daring nature, Franklin none the less felt growing in his heart
the stubbornness of the man of property, the landholding man, the man
who even unconsciously plans a home, resolved to cling to that which he
has taken of the earth's surface for his own. Heredity, civilization,
that which we call common sense, won the victory. Though he saw his
own face in the primeval mirror her