e things that women do with milk. I only knew your mother when she
was seventeen. No one seemed to know where Jeanette came from. Perhaps
Aunt Jed knew. I think she did, but she never told. I never asked. To me
Jeanette came straight from the hand of God.

"I have known many beautiful women, but since Jeanette, the beauty of
women has not spoken to the soul of me. There is a beauty--and it was
hers--that cries out, just as a still and glorious morning cries out, to
the open windows of the soul. To me Jeanette was all sighing, sobbing
beauty. Beauty did not rest upon her; it glowed through her. She alone
was the prism through which my eyes could look upon the Promised Land. I
knew it, and so--I told my father.

"I was only a boy, not yet of age. My father never hesitated. All the
power that law and tradition allowed he brought to bear. He forbade me
to visit Aunt Jed's or to see Jeanette again. He gave me to understand
that the years held no hope for me--that on the day I broke his command
I would cut myself off from him and home. To clinch things, he sent me
away to college a month early, and put me under a tutor.

"There is a love that forgets all else--that forgets honor. I forged a
letter to the authorities and signed my father's name to it. It told
them to send me back at once--that my mother was ill. I came back to
these hills, but not home. Far back in the woods here William Tuck had a
hut. He was a wood-cutter. He lived alone. He owed nothing to any man.
Many a time we had shot and fished together. I came back to William.

"This lane doesn't lead to Aunt Jed's. This land never belonged to her.
Here we used to meet, Jeanette and I. You see the mass of fox-grape over
yonder? In that day the wall hadn't tumbled. It stood straight and firm.
The fox-grape sprang from it and climbed in a great veil over the young
trees. Behind that wall, in the cool dusk of the grapevine, we used to
sit and laugh inside when a rare buggy or a wagon went by."

Leighton drew a long breath.

"I used to lie with my head in Jeanette's lap because it was the only
way I could see her eyes. Her lashes were so long that when she raised
them it was like the slow flutter of the wings of a butterfly at rest.
She did not raise them often. She kept them down--almost against the
soft round of her cheek--because--because, she said, she could dream
better that way.

"How shall I tell you about her hair? I used to reach up and pull at it
until it