tumbled. And then, because Jeanette's hair never laughed except
when it was the playmate of light, I used to drag her to her feet,
across the wall, across the lane, down there to the flat rock just above
the spring.

"There we would sit, side by side, and every once in a while look
fearfully around, so public seemed that open space. But all we ever saw
for our pains was a squirrel or perhaps a woodchuck looking around
fearfully, too. Jeanette would sit with her hands braced behind her, her
tumbled hair splashing down over her shoulders and down her back. The
setting sun would come skipping over the hills and play in her hair, and
Jeanette's hair would laugh--laugh out loud. And I--I would bury my face
in it, as you bury your face in flowers, and wonder at the unshed tears
that smarted in my eyes."

Leighton stopped to sigh. It was a quivering sigh that made Lewis want
to put out his hand and touch his father, but he was afraid to move.
Leighton went on.

"Look well about you, boy. No wheel has jarred this silence for many a
year--not since I bought the land you see and closed the road. Man
seldom comes here now,--only children in the fall of the year when the
chestnuts are ripe. Jeanette liked children. She was never anything but
a child herself. Look well about you, I say, for these still woods and
fields, with God's free air blowing over them,--they were your cradle,
the cradle of your being.

"It was Jeanette that made me go back to college when college opened,
but months later it was William that sent for me when Jeanette was too
weak to stop him. The term was almost over. Through all the winter I had
never mentioned Jeanette to the folks at home, hoping that my father
would let me come home for the summer and wander these hills unwatched.
Now William wrote. I couldn't make out each individual word, but the sum
of what he tried to tell flew to my heart.

"Jeanette had disappeared from Aunt Jed's three months before. They had
not found her, for they had watched for her only where I was. She had
gone to William's little house. She had been hidden away there. While
she was well enough, she had not let him send for me. There was panic in
William's letter, for he wrote that he would meet the first train by
which I could come, and every other train thereafter.

"You heard William say the other day that he had never driven like that
since--and there I stopped him. It was since the day I came back to
Jeanette he was