ld read her letters--but she always sent messages to her father and
Bub and to the old miller and old Hon, and Hale faithfully delivered
them when he could.

From her people, as Hale learned from his sister, only one messenger had
come during the year to June, and he came but once. One morning, a tall,
black-haired, uncouth young man, in a slouch hat and a Prince Albert
coat, had strode up to the school with a big paper box under his arm and
asked for June. As he handed the box to the maid at the door, it broke
and red apples burst from it and rolled down the steps. There was a
shriek of laughter from the girls, and the young man, flushing red as
the apples, turned, without giving his name, and strode back with no
little majesty, looking neither to right nor left. Hale knew and June
knew that the visitor was her cousin Dave, but she never mentioned the
incident to him, though as the end of the session drew nigh, her letters
became more frequent and more full of messages to the people in Lonesome
Cove, and she seemed eager to get back home. Over there about this time,
old Judd concluded suddenly to go West, taking Bud with him, and when
Hale wrote the fact, an answer came from June that showed the blot of
tears. However, she seemed none the less in a hurry to get back, and
when Hale met her at the station, he was startled; for she came back in
dresses that were below her shoe-tops, with her wonderful hair massed
in a golden glory on the top of her head and the little fairy-cross
dangling at a woman's throat. Her figure had rounded, her voice had
softened. She held herself as straight as a young poplar and she walked
the earth as though she had come straight from Olympus. And still, in
spite of her new feathers and airs and graces, there was in her eye and
in her laugh and in her moods all the subtle wild charm of the child in
Lonesome Cove. It was fairy-time for June that summer, though her father
and Bud had gone West, for her step-mother was living with a sister, the
cabin in Lonesome Cove was closed and June stayed at the Gap, not at the
Widow Crane's boarding-house, but with one of Hale's married friends
on Poplar Hill. And always was she, young as she was, one of the merry
parties of that happy summer--even at the dances, for the dance, too,
June had learned. Moreover she had picked up the guitar, and many times
when Hale had been out in the hills, he would hear her silver-clear
voice floating out into the moonlight