n me, Morgan. What I think is only guess-work--but
I don't believe she wanted you to find her."

CHAPTER XLIII

To Boone Wellver, Louisville had become a city lying without the zone of
personal experience. Like a steamer which has altered its sailings, he
made it no longer a port of call.

That mad hiatus of apostacy, in which he had been willing to throw down
all the shrines of his acquired faith, had become to him an evil dream
of the past--yet out of it something had remained. The fog which had
bemused him then had left uncleared certain minors of realization. Just
as he had not yet recognized that the Commonwealth's attorney had sent
him away unsatisfied because he had come making his demands to the
arrogant tune of insult, so he failed, too, to appreciate that Anne had
held the silence, which, without her permission, he was resolved not to
break, because he had violently rebuffed her.

He had refused to read the papers on the day set for her wedding,
because he could not bear the torture of what he had expected to find
there, and McCalloway had not spoken of the postponement because it fell
within the boundaries of a topic upon which he had set a ban of silence,
unless the younger man broached it. So with what would have seemed an
impossible coincidence, it was weeks later that Boone ceased to
flagellate himself with the thought of a honeymoon that had never begun.
Even then he, unlike the more sophisticated of the circle to which he
had once been admitted, accepted without question the reason given for
the deferred marriage, and saw for himself no brightening of
possibility.

With the curtain rung down on the thrilling drama whose theme had been
dominated by love, work seemed to Boone increasingly the motif of
things. Service appeared more and more the purpose meant in the blind
gropings of existence toward some end. Otherwise there was nothing.

But one day long after all this, when the months had run to seasons,
Boone broke his law of self-appointed exile and went to Louisville. He
did not go from Marlin Town but came the other way--from Washington.

For now the mountain man had his place on Capitol Hill and no longer
felt the uncertainty of diffidence in answering when he heard himself
recognized from the speaker's chair as "the gentleman from Kentucky."

It was not at all the Washington he had pictured. In many ways it was a
more wonderful, and in many a less wonderful, place than that known fr