nd courtin' her. I reckon"--those were hard
words to say, but he said them--"I reckon you had the right of it when
you said I was fixin' to break my heart anyhow. They won't ever let her
marry me."

It did not seem to him that it would help matters to explain that even
now he felt disloyal to his whole religion of love, and that he had
asked her only because he realized that no other man here could bring
Happy's life to fulfilment, while Anne could only step down to him in
condescension.

The decision which he had reached after tossing in a fevered delirium of
spirit lacked sanity. From no point of view would it conform to the
gauge of soundness. In giving up Anne, when Anne had told him he might
hope, he had construed all the sacrifice as his own. As to Anne's rights
in the matter, he was blinded by the over-modest conviction that she was
giving all and he taking all and that she could never _need_ him.

He would in later years have reasoned differently--but he had been
absorbing too fast to digest thoroughly, and the concepts of his
new-found chivalry had become a distorted quixoticism. He meant it only
for self-effacing fairness--and it was of course unfairness to himself,
to Anne, and even to Happy. But she divined his unconfessed thought with
the certitude of intuition.

"Boone," she told him, as she rose and laid a tremulous hand on his arm,
"you've done tried as hard as a man can to make the best of a bad
business. It wasn't anybody's fault that things fell out this way. It
just came to pass. I'm going to try to teach some of the right young
children over at the school next autumn--so what little I've learned
won't be wasted, after all. I want that we shall go on being good
friends--but just for a little while we'd better not see very much of
each other. It hurts too bad."

That was an unshakeable determination, and when, in obedience to the
edict, Boone had not come back for a week, Cyrus asked his daughter
briefly:

"When do you an' Boone aim ter be wedded?"

The girl flinched again, but her voice was steady as she replied:

"We--don't--never aim to be."

The old fellow's features stiffened into the stern indignation of an
affronted Indian chief. He took the pipe from between his teeth as he
set his shoulders, and that baleful light, that had come rarely in a
life-span, returned to his eyes.

"Ef he don't aim ter wed with ye," came the slow pronouncement, "thar
hain't no fashion he kin escape an ac