u're happy, then I'll laugh always. That's all I care for.
Now I know you're happy again, I'm happy, too, Chris--honour bright.
And I'll be a friend still--remember that--always--to you--to you and
him."

"I hate un, I say."

"Why, he didn't give me credit for being such a bat--such a mole. Now I
must be away. We'll meet pretty soon, I expect. Just forget this
afternoon as though it had never been, even though it's such a jolly
sunny one. And remember me as a friend--a friend still for all my
foolishness. Good-by for the present. Good-by."

He nodded, making the parting a slight thing and not missing the
ludicrous in his anxiety to spare her pain. He went down the valley,
leaving her sitting alone. He assumed a jaunty air and did not look
round, but hastened off to the stile. Never in his most light-hearted
moments had he walked thus or struck right and left at the leaves and
shrubs with such a clumsy affectation of nonchalance. Thus he played the
fool until out of sight; then his head came down, and his feet dragged,
and his walk and mien grew years older than his age. He stopped
presently and stood still, staring upon the silence. Westering sunlight
winnowed through the underwood, splashed into its sombre depths and
brightened the sobriety of a grey carpet dotted with dead cones. Sweet
scents floated downward upon the sad whisper that lives in every pine
forest; then came suddenly a crisp rattle of little claws and a tiny
barking, where two red squirrels made love, high aloft, amid the grey
lichens and emerald haze of a great larch that gleamed like a green lamp
through the night of the dark surrounding foliage.

Martin Grimbal dropped his stick and flung down his body in the hushed
and hidden dreamland of the wood. Now he knew that his hope had lied to
him, that the judgment he prided himself upon, and which had prompted
him to this great deed, was at fault. The more than common tact and
delicacy of feeling he had sometimes suspected he possessed in rare,
exalted moments, were now shown vain ideas born from his own conceit;
and the event had proved him no more subtle, clever, or far-seeing than
other men. Indeed, he rated himself as an abject blunderer and thought
he saw how a great overwhelming fear, at the bottom of his worship of
Chris, had been the only true note in all that past war of emotions. But
he had refused to listen and pushed forward; and now he stood thus.
Looking back in the light of his defeat, h