nst the boy's heart with the power of
lightning and tornado.

Anne was at her father's house for several weeks, and scarcely a day of
that time did her vassal fail to ride across the mountain, but those
hours squandered together were fleet of wing. McCalloway smiled
observantly and held his counsel. The charm and gaiety of Anne's bright
personality would do more to dispel the menace of gloom from the dark
corners of the boy's nature, where tendencies of melancholy lurked, than
all his own efforts and wisdom. Later there would come an aftermath of
bitter heartache, for between them lay the fortified frontier which
separates red blood and blue; the demarcation of the contrary codes of
Jubal and Tubal Cain, but at that thought the soldier shrugged his
shoulders with a ripe philosophy. Just now the girl's influence was
precisely what the lad needed. Later, when perhaps he needed something
else, he would take his punishment with decent courage, and even the
punishment would do him good. A blade is not forged and tempered without
being pounded between anvil and sledge--and if Boone could not stand
it--then Boone could not realize the dreams which McCalloway built for
his future.

The wisdom of middle-age can treat, as ephemeral, disasters in which
first love can contemplate only incurable scars. Boone himself regarded
the golden present as an era for which the whole future must pay with
unrelieved levies of black despair.

It was chiefly as he rode home at night that he faced this death's-head
future with young lips stiffening and eyes narrowed. In the morning
sunlight, or through woods that sobbed with rain, he went buoyant,
because then he was going toward her, and whatever the indefinite future
held in store, he had that day assured with all its richness.

None-the-less, Boone played the game as he saw it, with the guiding
instincts of a gentleman. Because it was all a wonderful dream, doomed
to an eventual awakening, he sealed his lips against love-making.

Anne was taking him for granted, he reasoned. He had simply become a
local necessity to a bright nature, overflowing with vital and
companionable impulses.

As vassal he gladly and proudly offered himself, and as vassal she
frankly and without analysis accepted him. Should he let slip the check
upon his control, and go to mooning about love, instead of meeting her
laughter with his laughter and her jest with his jest, she would send
him away into a deserved exil