ining key from between the logs and thrust it into her hands.

"Go ahead," he said. "Hit's yourn."

"Some more o' Jack Hale's fool doin's," said the old woman. "Go on, gal,
and see whut he's done."

With eager hands she put the key in the lock and when she pushed open
the door, she gasped. Another room had been added to the cabin--and the
fragrant smell of cedar made her nostrils dilate. Bub pushed by her and
threw open the shutters of a window to the low sunlight, and June stood
with both hands to her head. It was a room for her--with a dresser, a
long mirror, a modern bed in one corner, a work-table with a student's
lamp on it, a wash-stand and a chest of drawers and a piano! On the
walls were pictures and over the mantel stood the one she had first
learned to love--two lovers clasped in each other's arms and under them
the words "Enfin Seul."

"Oh-oh," was all she could say, and choking, she motioned Bub from the
room. When the door closed, she threw herself sobbing across the bed.

Over at the Gap that night Hale sat in his office with a piece of white
paper and a lump of black coal on the table in front of him. His foreman
had brought the coal to him that day at dusk. He lifted the lump to the
light of his lamp, and from the centre of it a mocking evil eye leered
back at him. The eye was a piece of shining black flint and told him
that his mine in Lonesome Cove was but a pocket of cannel coal and worth
no more than the smouldering lumps in his grate. Then he lifted the
piece of white paper--it was his license to marry June.

XXIV

Very slowly June walked up the little creek to the old log where she had
lain so many happy hours. There was no change in leaf, shrub or tree,
and not a stone in the brook had been disturbed. The sun dropped the
same arrows down through the leaves--blunting their shining points into
tremulous circles on the ground, the water sang the same happy tune
under her dangling feet and a wood-thrush piped the old lay overhead.

Wood-thrush! June smiled as she suddenly rechristened the bird for
herself now. That bird henceforth would be the Magic Flute to musical
June--and she leaned back with ears, eyes and soul awake and her brain
busy.

All the way over the mountain, on that second home-going, she had
thought of the first, and even memories of the memories aroused by that
first home-going came back to her--the place where Hale had put his
horse into a dead run and had given her