d-lines of a single family, but also the warp and woof of national
beginnings. In his imagination he completed the trinity. The Colonel and
his servant were exponents of the Old South and its gracious oligarchy.
Boone sprang from the hills that bred a race which some one had called
"The Roundheads of the South." Yet at the start Boone's blood and that
of the Colonel's had perhaps been one blood: the sap of a single and
identical tap-root. Two brothers, setting out together in that hegira of
empire seekers that turned their faces west, had perhaps been separated
by the chances of the wilderness trail. One had won through, and his
sons and daughters had dwelt in ease. One had fallen by the hard road,
and the mould of decay had taken him root and branch. The name of the
stranded one had lapsed into its phonetic equivalent--as had the
negro's--and yet--

"No matter. He does not seem to have guessed it," murmured McCalloway.
"Perhaps after all it's as well so. He'll make the name as he wears it
one that men will come to know."

CHAPTER XXXII

Summer, before it has freckled into hot fulness and forgotten the fresh
scent and colour of blossoms! June heralding blitheness from the golden
throats of troubadour field larks, rustling and crooning her message in
green branches under a sky whose blue is proclamation of her love motif!

Certainly to Boone Wellver and Anne Masters picking strawberries
together in a little arbour-walled, orchard-bounded world of garden, the
centre of life lay within themselves, and the letters of life spelled
"You and I."

On the girl's uncovered hair the stir of a light breeze and the sparkle
of a clear sun awoke that dispute of dominion of which McCalloway had
spoken; contention along the borderland between brown and gold. On her
cheek the crystal brightness threw its searching question and revealed
no flaw.

Boone, looking up from the place where he knelt among the vines, found
in his own heart the echo to all the day's minstrelsy. He rose to his
feet with his bronzed face paled under a sudden wave of emotion, which
broke out of his surcharged feeling as a whitecap breaks on the crest of
a high running swell. His eyes, devouringly fixed on the girl, blazed
into a wordless adoration, and he felt, at once, giant-strong and
water-weak in the surge of the great paradox. It would just then have
been as easy for him to construe the fourth dimension as to put his
lover's thoughts into a lover