e.

On the day before Anne was to leave they were on the great pinnacle rock
above Slag-face, and by now Boone had come to regard that as the lofty
shrine where he had discovered love. Afterwards it would stand through
the years as a spot of hallowed memories.

Anne had been talking with vivacious enthusiasm of the things she had
seen abroad, and Boone had followed her with rapt attentiveness. She had
a natural gift for vivid description, and he had seemed to stand with
her, by moonlight in the ruins of the Coliseum, and to look out with her
from the top of Cheops' pyramid over the sands of Ghizeh and the ribbon
of the Nile.

But at last they had fallen silent, and with something like a sigh the
girl said, "Tomorrow I go back to Louisville."

He had forgotten that for the moment, and he flinched at the reminder,
but his only reply was, "And in a few days I've got to go back to
Lexington. I always miss the hills down there."

Her violet eyes challenged him with full directness, "Won't you
miss--anything else?"

Boone, who was looking at her, closed his eyes. He was sure that they
would betray him, and when he ventured to open them again he had
prudently averted his gaze. But though he looked elsewhere, he still saw
her. He saw the hair that had enmeshed his heart like a snare, saw the
eyes that held an inner sparkle--which was for him an altar fire.

"I'm not the sort of feller that can help missing his friends," he
guardedly said, but his tongue felt dry and unwieldy.

Usually people were not so niggardly as that with their compliments to
Anne, and as she held a half-piqued silence Boone knew that she was
offended, so his next question came with a stammering incertitude.

"You _are_ a friend of mine, aren't you?"

She rose then from the rock where she had been sitting and stood there
lance-like, with her chin high and her glance averted. To his question
she offered no response save a short laugh, until the pulses in his
temples began to throb, and once more he closed his eyes as one
instinctively closes them under a wave of physical pain.

Boone had made valiant and chivalrous resolves of silence, but he had
heard a laugh touched with bitterness from lips upon which bitterness
was by nature alien.

"Anne!" he exclaimed in a frightened tone, "what made you laugh like
that?"

Then she wheeled, and her words came torrentially. There was anger and
perplexity and a little scorn in her voice but also a dominan