irring in the mind of the young man. By nature he was
an individualist whose inherent prompting was to walk his own way
neither interfering with his neighbour nor permitting his neighbour to
encroach unduly upon him. Had he been a quoter of Scripture his chosen
text might have been, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

And if that had been the natural colour of his mind and nature it was
deepened and intensified by his circumstance. The man whom the law seeks
and whom it charges with murder must keep to himself and within himself
if he would escape notice and capture. Yet now the older impulses that
had driven and urged his pioneering ancestors were beginning to claim
voice, too, and this voice demanded of him "can any man live alone?"

Somehow that plea from the hunchbacked Doane had, with its flaming
sincerity, left its unforgettable mark upon him. His own affairs
included a need of hiding from Virginia sheriffs and of reckoning with
Bas Rowlett, and yet he began to wonder if his own private affairs were
not after all only part of a whole, and as such smaller than the whole.
If a man is born to play a part greater in its bearings than the merely
personal he cannot escape his destiny, and to-night some stirring of
that cloudy realization was troubling Thornton.

"Let's get some leaves offen ther old tree," suggested the girl in a
hushed voice, "an' make a kind of green kiverlet over him." She
shuddered as she added, "Ther ground's plum naked!"

When they had performed their whimsical service--these two
representatives of a grimly unimaginative race of stoics--they went
again and stood together under the tree and into the girl's grief and
the man's forebodings crept an indefinable anodyne of quiet and
consolation.

That tree had known death before, and always after death it had known
rebirth. It could stand serene and placid over hearts bruised as was her
own because it had heard the echoes of immortality and seen the
transient qualities of human grief.

Now she could realize only death and death's wounding, but to it the
seasons came and went as links in an unbroken chain. Beneath it slept
the first friends who had loved it. Somewhere in the great, star-strewn
spaces above it perhaps dwelt the souls of unborn men and women who
would love it hereafter. Somehow its age-old and ever-young message
seemed to come soothingly to her heart. "All end is but beginning, and
no end is final. The present is but hesitation between pas