to visit the father, who held his position there, remote from
the things that, to his thinking, made up the values of life.

During these periods Boone found life a strange and paradoxical pattern,
woven of a web of ecstasy and a woof of torture. Since that night when
he had dragged suddenly at his bridle curb and had told himself, "I
might as well fall in love with a star up there in heaven," he had never
departed from his resolute conviction that it would be sheer insanity
for him to entertain any thought of Anne, save that of the willing and
faithful slave who would joyously have laid his life down for her.

She dominated his world of boyhood dreams, and since he was not deaf to
the talk about himself and "Cyrus Spradling's gal," he wondered if he
ought not to tell Happy the whole truth. But after long reflection he
shook his head.

"It would only hurt Happy, like telling her about dreams that come at
night--of some sort of heaven where I don't see her, herself." And so he
did not tell her.

* * * * *

One day in the spring of the year when Anne was sixteen, Mrs. Larry
Masters dropped into the office of her kinsman, Tom Wallifarro, to talk
over some small matter of business. It was one of the regrets of the
lady's life--a life somewhat touched and frost-bitten by
bitterness--that all of her business was small. It was, however, one of
her compensations that this gentleman gave to her petty affairs as much
care and consideration as to the major features of his large practice.

"My dear," observed the Colonel irrelevantly as he looked at the weary
eyes of the woman who had in her day been an almost famous beauty, "you
seem worried. You are altogether too young to let lines creep into your
face."

Mrs. Masters laughed mirthlessly.

"I have a daughter growing up. I am ambitious for her. She has charm,
grace, breeding--and she's the poor member of a rich family. Such things
bring wrinkles around maternal eyes, Cousin Tom."

"Happily she lives in Kentucky," the lawyer reminded his visitor. "We
are yet provincial enough to think something of blood, even when it's
not gilded with money."

"Yes, thank God--and thanks to you, she has had educational advantages.
If Larry had only had business sense--but I can't talk patiently about
Larry."

"No--I wish you could bring yourself to think of him more indulgently,
but--" Colonel Tom knew the fruitlessness of that line of counsel, so he
b