good deal to--" He paused a moment, and added
clumsily, "to friendships."

Perhaps it was the word itself, or perhaps, and that is likelier, it was
the light and unconscious stress with which Boone spoke it that told her
without fuller explanation what he had come to confess. Two syllables
brought her face to face with revelation, and all else he might say
would be only redundancy. Already she had feared it at times when she
lay wakeful in her bed.

From that day when he had called her "Rebekkah at the Well," she had
been in love with him. She had not awakened to any hot ambition until
she had been fired with the incentive of paralleling his own educational
course. Now if he were not to be in her life she had only developed
herself out of her natural setting into a doom of miserable discontent.

It had always seemed as rational an assumption that their futures should
merge as that the only pair of falcons in a forest full of jack-daws
should mate.

Now he spoke of friendships!

Yet the girl, though stunned with bitter disappointment, was not wholly
astonished.

Topics of gossip are rare enough to be made much of in the hills, and
the neighbours had not failed to intimate in her hearing that when she
was away her "beau" had been sitting devotedly at other feet; but Happy
had smiled tranquilly upon her informants. "Boone would be right apt to
be charitable to a stranger," she had said, giving them none of the
satisfaction of seeing the thorn rankle, which is not to say that she
did not feel the sting. She had found false security in the thought that
Boone, even if he felt Anne's allurement, would be too sensible to raise
his eyes to her as a possibility since their worlds were not only
different but veritable antipodes of circumstance. What she had failed
to consider was that the Romeos and Juliets of the world have never
taken thought of what the houses of Montague and Capulet might say.

For a while now she sat very silent, her hands in her lap tightly
clasped and unmoving, but when she spoke her voice was even and soft.

"Thank you, Boone," she said; then after a moment, "Boone, is there
anything you'd like to tell me?"

The young man looked suddenly up at her, and his reply was a question,
too--an awkward and startled one: "What about, Happy--what do you mean?"

"The best thing friends can do--is to listen to what interests--each
other. Sometimes there are things we keep right silent about--in
general, I