en with a white face she drew
a line through the name on the list. At least he should be spared that
heartlessness of reminder.

She and Morgan were going abroad. Morgan had foreign business which made
the journey imperative, and it was only when the courts adjourned and
political matters fell quiet with the coming of summer that he could so
long be away from his practice and his public affairs, but Anne could
not think of Europe now. Her thoughts turned mutinously to imagined
vistas seen from a rock at the lop of Slag-face across valleys where
sunset cast the shadows of mountains: where just now the dogwood was in
a foam of blossom and the laurel would soon be in pink flowering.

CHAPTER XLII

When Victor McCalloway came home in June he read in the face of the
young man he met there that chapters deeply shadowed had been written
into his life, and Boone was prompt enough in his confessions, though
when he alluded to Anne's approaching marriage his words became meagre
and his utterance flat with a hampering distrust of emotion and
self-betrayal.

McCalloway gazed off grave-eyed across the small door-yard and
mercifully refrained from any hurtful attempt at verbal solace.

Finally when the hum of bees in the honeysuckle had been the only
disturbers of their long silence, the Scotchman spoke--and the younger
features relaxed into relief because the words did not, even in
kindness, touch upon the soreness of his mood. "The old spruce over
there--the one that used to be the tallest thing we saw--it's gone,
isn't it?"

Boone nodded. "The sleet took it down last winter."

Victor McCalloway was sage enough in human diagnosis to divine that,
however much Boone had suffered through a period of months, the
expression of quiet but well nigh unendurable suffering that just now
haunted his eyes had not been constant in them. A man subjected long to
that soul-cramping stress, with no outlet or abatement, would have
become a melancholiac. In one sense it might be a chronic wretchedness,
but today some particular incitement had rendered it acute--acute beyond
the power of stoic blood to hold in concealment.

Repression only made the gnawing ache more burdensome. McCalloway wished
that Boone might have gone, like the less inhibited folk of an elder
generation, to some wailing wall and beat his breast with clenched
fists--and come away less pent with hard control.

"I'll just go in and have a look over my scant accumul