Yearning, curiosity and honest interest marked the words, but the face of the girl was a child's face, not a woman's. "He must be a right big boy now!"

The man standing in The Way could not repress a smile. He saw that Cynthia Walden had in fancy enshrined the boy Sandy, but would she welcome the man Sandy had become? Fearfully, dreading the test that must be made, he drew nearer, and with lowered eyes bowed, and said:

"I am Sandy Morley!"

Cynthia gave a frightened glance at the tall, dark stranger in the road. She noticed, as if for the first time, his high laced boots, his corduroy trousers fastened in them, his flannel shirt and felt hat.

All was fine and different, oh! so different from the ragged ugliness of the hills. That a stranger should be so clad did not interest her, but that her childhood's friend and slave should wear this livery of position shattered the beautiful portrait of the "Biggest of Them All"

by one cruel blow.

"No! You cannot be Sandy--not Sandy Morley." Cynthia stepped back with outstretched hands as if to ward off an attack. The light faded from Sandy Morley's face and his eyes grew dark and pleading.

"I've been right homesick all the years," he faltered. "I've tried to make myself worthy to come back. Always I have dreamed of you standing as you stand now under the dogwoods, to welcome me, but now that I have come up The Way I find myself a--stranger!"

Cynthia was clutching the bough of a tree for support; her eyes were strained and pathetic.

"I--I do not know what I have expected," she whispered, her eyes clinging to his; "but it is this-er-way. I have made a different Sandy, and I've kept him so long in my dreams and fancies, that to see him a _man_, hurts. Oh! it hurts here!"

The clasped hands touched the panting bosom. Then Sandy came close to her and laid his firm, thin hand upon hers. The touch, the contact, brought sharply to the girl the memory of their parting when, beside The Way, she had asked him to marry her some day and Sandy had kissed her!

"Little Cynthia, try to make a place in Lost Hollow for the man Sandy, who has come home a lonely stranger."

He seemed old and detached, but his nearness and the memory of their last interview composed Cynthia. She drew back and the withdrawal hurt Sandy more than she could know.

"I--I must go!" she panted and turned, as in the old parting, and ran without one backward look.

Sandy stood and gazed after her with yearning eyes. Outwardly she was all his faithful heart could have asked. Her face, as he had seen it a few moments ago under the dogwoods, seemed placed there by some kind and good Providence to welcome him to his own after all the waiting years; the child, Cynthia, he had lost while he tarried afar. Manlike he was ready to accept the woman. But Cynthia was not a woman, and her immature nature was shocked and betrayed by him who had come claiming what she had ready, only for the boy of her childish faith and love.

Sad at heart, Sandy, after a few moments of readjustment, went mournfully up the trail leading to the old home-cabin. One bright gleam, alone, cheered him. There had been some mistake. Martin Morley was evidently alive and to him Sandy must look for welcome and the renewing of old ties.

The change in the cabin was startling. Empty, but neat and pleasant, the living-room stood open to the fair spring day. Flowers were standing in the windows in dented tin cans; the hearth was swept free of ashes and there was a small garden in the rear of the house, nicely laid out and planted. It seemed so like his own old garden that Sandy gazed upon it with strange emotions. He relived sharply the starved years of preparation, the cruelty and neglect. He went inside finally and sat down upon the settle by the hearth and, with bowed head, gave himself up to memory.

An hour passed and then a step outside roused him, but he did not turn.

"Sir, I reckon you be the boss of the new factory. I was a-going down to The Forge to seek you out and ask for work, but Tansey Moore, down to the store, 'lowed that 'twas you who had passed up this-er-way. If you be the boss could you----"

But he got no further. Sandy could not run the risk of another clash of words.

"Father!" he said, standing up and stretching his arms out pitifully to Martin. "Father!"

Morley recoiled for an instant and his eyes, old and dim, struggled to see clearly the figure and face before him. But it was not the mortal eyes of the man that saw and knew. It was the _father_ that reached out with unerring instinct to its own! Martin had never had his dreams of what his boy was to become; he was there to accept whatever God in His mercy sent to him.

"Sandy! lil' Sandy! My boy!"

And then the tottering old frame was gathered in the strong young arms.

"Dad, dear old Dad. I've got a right good job for you!"

That was all. For a few minutes the clock on the high shelf ticked so loudly that it seemed to fill the room with noise. Neither man spoke, but they clung desperately. Presently a shadow fell across the floor and Sandy turned his head. Old Bob had found his way up from The Forge and panting and wheezing began to sniff around the room. Almost blind, yet guided by that sense we cannot understand, he had sought his own and found them. With a soft cry he crouched close to the two standing by the hearth and whined piteously. Martin aroused and stood upright.

"It's--it's Bob!" he cried. "Oh, Bob! Oh, Bob!" Then falteringly: "It's all right, Bob, she won't trouble you now--she's gone for good and all!"

That was the only reference to Mary, and Sandy did not tell Martin of little Molly's fate for many a day.

CHAPTER XVIII

If one can forget the languor of the summer and the fear of the winter, a September day among the hills is an experience to set the heart singing. The fluttering birds in busy preparation for flight, the carpet of Persian colours and the subtle charm of the smell of wood smoke in the air, all combine to arouse tender thoughts and pensive desires.

On such a day Cynthia Walden ran down the trail from Stoneledge and kept to the side of The Way where the leaves were thickest and the damp sweetness the richest. She wore her blue linen--it had been laundried many times since that May morning when Sandy first saw her in it; but, as Sally Taber, working under strict instructions, dried it in a pillow case--the colour was still true blue and the shrinkage slight.

Many things had occurred during the past four months. Wonderful breath-taking things; things that aroused many emotions and many passions. For one thing, that brave company in the North, which Sandy represented, had actually had the audacity and daring to start operations on a splendid factory building! Smith Crothers was sullenly, silently watching operations and making, apparently, indifferent threats as to what might be expected to happen to any Hollowite--"man, woman or child"--who turned from him and his interests to the factory back of Lost Hollow.

"There ain't any known head to the concern," he said one night at the County Club, "lest you count that youngster of Morley's as a head. I leave it to you--can you-all trust a Morley?"

The solemn pause before Mason Hope ventured a "no" gave Crothers food for reflection. Sandy was making his way into the confidence and appreciation of his people. Slowly, to be sure, so slowly that often he sighed disheartedly, but the change in attitude was noticeable and Sandy knew it when the sun shone and Cynthia Walden deigned to speak a pleasant word to him.

Beside the factory and near to it ground had been broken and a foundation laid for a building about which people, especially mothers, spoke in hushed voices.

"It can't be true," Liza Hope had said to Mrs. Tansey Moore one day as they dropped in to Theodore Starr's church to take breath and a dip of snuff. "A Home-school! that's what the Cup-o'-Cold-Water Lady said it was, and when I axed her to say it plainer and not so polite, she done 'splain as how the chillens, our chillens, war to be gathered in from everywhere--even factories,--and teached and--and mothered! That's her word--mothered!"

"Don't them-all think us-all is--mothers?" Mrs. Moore sniffed contemptuously. "Us as borned them reckons we-all is mothers."

"But it's this-er-way." Liza was Marcia Lowe's interpreter to the cabin-folk and was gradually drawing them to the point where more than one had gone voluntarily to Trouble Neck and, after a chat and a cup of tea, had uttered the mystic word "youcum," which meant, "you call on me." No higher honour could a mountain woman bestow than this!

But Mrs. Tansey Moore had never taken the little doctor up socially.

"It's this-er-way. We-all can't act out what's in us-all. You know, Rose-Lily"--Mrs. Moore had one of the funeral-design names which so often decorated the plainest of her sex among the hills--"we-all just get caught in the wheels and go round like what we-all have to. I reckon you wouldn't have let your Sammy-Jo into the factory if the heart of you could ha' spoke. Seems like yesterday when I saw them-all totin' Sammy-Jo up The Way to kiss you good-bye, an' him only ten years old an' dyin' o' the hurt o' the wheels."

Rose-Lily bowed her head on her work-roughened hands and sobbed miserably.

"An' I reckon I wouldn' ha' let my po' lil' half-wit chile go--if I could ha' helped it. When Mason licked him down The Way o' mornin' it made the soul o' me sick. When the factory burned I thanked A'mighty God for, starvin' or not starvin,' the po' lil' feller couldn't go!

The night he died in Miss Lowe's cabin when she war tryin' her charm on him--I jes' war right glad, for the factory down to The Forge war jes'

about done and I war thankful he couldn't get caught in the wheels agin! I tell yo', Rose-Lily, the mother in us-all don't get a chance in The Hollow, but the Cup-o'-Cold-Water Lady don' say things is goin'

to be different. She 'lows that the Home-school will jes' make up to us-all for what's been denied."

Mrs. Moore moaned softly and shook her head. "It don't sound--earthly!" she muttered.

But Cynthia, tripping light-heartedly over the gold and red leaves by The Way, sang her gayest songs and cared not a rap for the new factory or the unearthly Home-school; she was thinking of Martin Morley's cabin and the miracle that had been performed there. She was bound for the cabin. Martin would surely be away, for his "job" demanded that he should watch the men working in gangs on the new buildings. Sandy was up North. He had been summoned there by Levi Markham, who had wanted to come to The Hollow but had been held back by Sandy.

"They are taking me hard," Sandy had written; "let me have time to win them over before you come. Your money is a great drawback to me."

Then Markham wrote a characteristic command. The faithful old heart throbbed through every line and had caused poor Sandy to laugh until he cried:

Then come up North at once with reports and plans. I'm not going to let you make ducks and drakes of my hard earnings without knowing why.

Matilda--isn't very strong. She's taken to counting her blessings nights instead of sleeping. By the way--have you heard anything of Treadwell? His new fangled moral van has gone smash, they say; not called by its old-fashioned name, and he's--skipped. If you hear anything of him, let me know.