ced to submit to other destinies at twenty. The girl was
thinking--but that was her secret, and if she was bravely masking a
tortured heart it should be left inviolate in its secrecy.

The young man in his abstraction did not mark how long the silence held,
and when at last Happy rose he came out of his revery with a start.

"Boone, I'm mighty glad you felt that you could talk to me this way,"
she said. "I want to be a _real_ friend. But I've been working hard
today--and if it won't hurt your feelings, I wish you'd go home now. I'm
dog-tired, and I'd like to go to bed."

He had started away, but the evening had brought such surprises--and
such a lifting of heavy anxiety--that he wanted to mull matters over out
there in the soothing moonlight and the clean sweetness of the air.

So he sat down on a boulder where the shadow blotted him into the night,
and when he had been there for a while he looked up in a fresh
astonishment. Happy had not gone to bed. She was coming now across the
stile, with movements like those of a sleep-walker. Outside on the road
she stood for a while, pallid and wraith-like in the moonlight, looking
in the direction she supposed he had taken, while her fingers plucked at
her dress with distressed little gestures. Then with unsteady steps she
went on to the edge of the highway and leaned against the boll of a tall
poplar. He could see that her eyes were wide and her lips moving. Then
she wheeled and threw her hands, with outspread fingers, against the
cool bark above her head, leaning there as a child might lean on a
mother's bosom, and the sobs that shook her slender body came to him
across the short interval of distance.

Boone went over to her with hurried strides, and when she felt his hands
on her shoulders she wheeled. Then only did her brave disguise fail her,
and she demanded almost angrily, forgetting her school-taught diction,
"Why didn't ye go home like I told ye? Why does ye hev ter dog me this
fashion, atter I'd done sent ye away?"

"What's the matter, Happy?" he demanded; but he knew now, well enough,
and he was too honest to dissimulate. "I didn't know, Happy," he
pleaded. "I thought you meant it all."

"I did mean hit all--I means thet I wants thet ye should be
happy--only--" Her voice broke there as she added, "--only I've done
always thought of myself as yore gal."

She broke away from him with those words and fled back into the house,
and most of that night Boone tramped