Suddenly Boone laid the sword on the table and dropped on his knees beside it, with his hands clasped over the hilt.

"Almighty G.o.d," he prayed, "give me the strength to make good--and not disappoint him."

It was a heavy hearted young man who presented himself the next night at the house of Cyrus Spradling, and one who went as a penitent to the confessional.

Once more the father sat on the porch alone with his twilight pipe, and once more the skies behind the ridges were high curtains of pale amber.

"Ye're a sight fer sore eyes, boy," declared the old mountaineer heartily. "An' folks 'lows thet ye aims ter run fer office, too. Wa'al, I reckon betwixt me an' you, we kin contrive ter make sh.o.r.e of yore gettin' two votes anyhow. I pledges ye mine fer sartain."

Boone laughed though tears would better have fitted his mood, and the old fellow chuckled at his own pleasantry.

"I reckon my gal will be out presently," Cyrus went on. "I've done concluded thet ye war p'int-blank right in arguing that schoolin'

wouldn't harm her none."

But when the girl came out, the man went in and left them, as he always did, and though the plucking of banjos within told of the family full gathered, none of the other members interrupted the presumed courtship which was so cordially approved.

Happy stood for a moment in the doorway against a lamplit background, and Boone acknowledged to himself that she had an undeniable beauty and that she carried herself with the simple grace of a slender poplar. She was, he told himself with unsparing self-accusation, in every way worthier than he, for she had fought her battles without aid, and now she stood there smiling on him confidently out of dark eyes that made no effort to render their welcome coy with provocative concealment.

"Howdy, Boone," she said in a voice of soft and musical cadences. "It's been a long time since I've seen you."

"Yes," he answered with a painful sort of slowness, "but now that we're both through school and back home to stay, I reckon we'll see each other oftener. Are you glad to come back, Happy?"

For a few moments the girl looked at him in the faint glow that came through the door, without response. It was as though her answer must depend on what she read in his face, and there was not light enough for its reading.

"I don't quite know, myself, Boone," she said hesitantly at last. "I've sort of been studying over it. How about you?"

When she had settled into a chair, he took a seat at her feet with his back against one of the posts of the porch, and replied with an a.s.sumption of certainty that he did not feel, "A feller's bound to be glad to get back to his own folks."

"After I'd been down there the first time and came back here again, _I_ wasn't glad," was her candid rejoinder. "I felt like I just couldn't bear it. Over there things were all clean, and folks paid some attention to qualities--only they didn't call 'em that. They say 'manners' at the school. Here it seemed like I'd come home to a human pig-sty--and I was plumb ashamed of my own folks. When I looked ahead and saw a lifetime of that--it seemed to me that I'd rather kill myself than go on with it."

"You say"--Boone made the inquiry gravely--"that you felt like that at first. How do you feel now?"

"Later on I got to feelin' ashamed of myself, instead of my people," she replied. "I got to seein' that I was faultin' them for not having had the chance they were slavin' to give me."

Boone bent attentively forward but he said nothing, and she went on.

"You know as well as I do that, so far, there aren't many people here that have much use for changes, but there are some few. The ground that the school sets on was given by an old man that didn't have much else to give. I remember right well what he said in the letter he wrote. It's printed in their catalogue: 'I don't look after wealth for them, but I want all young-uns taught to live right. I have heart and cravin' that our people may grow better, and I deed my land to a school as long as the Const.i.tution of the United States stands.' I reckon that's the right spirit, Boone."

CHAPTER XXII

Still the boy sat silent, with his chin in his hand, as sits the self-torturing figure of Rodin's bronze "Penseur"--the att.i.tude of thought which kills peace. Boone understood that unless Happy found a man who shared with her that idea of keeping the torch lit in the midst of darkness, her life might benefit others, but for herself it would be a distressing failure.

Happy had fancied him, that he realized, but he had thought of it as a phase through which she would pa.s.s with only such a scar as ephemeral affairs leave--one of quick healing.

Now the fuller significance was clear. He knew that she faced a life which her very efforts at betterment would make unspeakably bleak, unless she found companionship. He saw that to him she looked for release from that wretched alternative--and he had come to tell her that, beyond a deep and sincere friendship, he had nothing to offer her.

Such an announcement, though truthfulness requires it, is harder for being deferred.

Words seemed elusive and unmanageable as he made his beginning. "I'm right glad that we are neighbours again, Happy," he told her. "I'm not much to brag on--but I set a value on the same things you do--and I reckon that means a good deal to--" He paused a moment, and added clumsily, "to friendships."

Perhaps it was the word itself, or perhaps, and that is likelier, it was the light and unconscious stress with which Boone spoke it that told her without fuller explanation what he had come to confess. Two syllables brought her face to face with revelation, and all else he might say would be only redundancy. Already she had feared it at times when she lay wakeful in her bed.

From that day when he had called her "Rebekkah at the Well," she had been in love with him. She had not awakened to any hot ambition until she had been fired with the incentive of paralleling his own educational course. Now if he were not to be in her life she had only developed herself out of her natural setting into a doom of miserable discontent.

It had always seemed as rational an a.s.sumption that their futures should merge as that the only pair of falcons in a forest full of jack-daws should mate.

Now he spoke of friendships!

Yet the girl, though stunned with bitter disappointment, was not wholly astonished.

Topics of gossip are rare enough to be made much of in the hills, and the neighbours had not failed to intimate in her hearing that when she was away her "beau" had been sitting devotedly at other feet; but Happy had smiled tranquilly upon her informants. "Boone would be right apt to be charitable to a stranger," she had said, giving them none of the satisfaction of seeing the thorn rankle, which is not to say that she did not feel the sting. She had found false security in the thought that Boone, even if he felt Anne's allurement, would be too sensible to raise his eyes to her as a possibility since their worlds were not only different but veritable antipodes of circ.u.mstance. What she had failed to consider was that the Romeos and Juliets of the world have never taken thought of what the houses of Montague and Capulet might say.

For a while now she sat very silent, her hands in her lap tightly clasped and unmoving, but when she spoke her voice was even and soft.

"Thank you, Boone," she said; then after a moment, "Boone, is there anything you'd like to tell me?"

The young man looked suddenly up at her, and his reply was a question, too--an awkward and startled one: "What about, Happy--what do you mean?"

"The best thing friends can do--is to listen to what interests--each other. Sometimes there are things we keep right silent about--in general, I mean--and yet we get lonesome--for somebody to talk to--about those things."

There was a pause, and then as Happy explained, the seeming serenity of her manner was a supreme test of self-effacement which deserved an accolade for bravery.

"I'd heard it hinted--that you thought a heap of a girl--down below--I thought maybe you'd like to tell me about her."

How should he know that words so simply spoken in the timbre of calm naturalness came from a heart that was agonized?

How could he guess that the quiet figure sitting in the low chair was suffering inexpressible pain, or that the eyes that looked out through half-closed lids seemed to see a world of rocking hills, black under clouds of an unrelieved hopelessness?

One who has come braced for an ordeal and finds that he has reared for himself a fict.i.tious trouble, can realize in the moment of reaction only the vast elation of relief.

Had her acting been less perfect, he might have caught a shadowing forth of the truth--but, as it was, he only felt that shackles had been knocked from him, and that he stood a free man.

So he made a clean breast of how Anne had become his ideal; how he had fought that discovery as an absurdly impossible love, and how for that reason he had never before spoken of his feelings. But he did not, of course, intimate that it had been Anne herself who had finally given him a right to hope.

Happy listened in sympathetic silence, and when he was through she said, still softly:

"Boone, I reckon you've got a right hopeful life-span stretching out ahead of you--but are you sure you aren't fixing to break your heart, boy? Don't those folks down there--hold themselves mighty high? Don't they--sort of--look down on us mountain people?"

It was a fair question, yet one which he could not answer without betraying Anne's stout a.s.sertion of reciprocated feeling. He could only nod his head and declare, "A feller must take his chances, I reckon."

From the dark forests the whippoorwills called in those plaintive notes that reach the heart. Down by the creek the frogs boomed out, and platinum mists lay dreamily between their soft emphases of shadow. Boone was thinking of the girl whose star hung there in the sky. His heart was singing in elation, "She loves me and, thank G.o.d, Happy understands, too. My way lies clear!" He was not reflecting just then that princesses have often spoken as boldly as Anne had done, at sixteen, and have been forced to submit to other destinies at twenty. The girl was thinking--but that was her secret, and if she was bravely masking a tortured heart it should be left inviolate in its secrecy.

The young man in his abstraction did not mark how long the silence held, and when at last Happy rose he came out of his revery with a start.