--and looked for the last time out at the gray old pines
and dim blue, ever wintry firs. Beyond were house-tops and
tree-tops of the town; and beyond these lay the country--stretching
away to his home. Soon the morning light would be crimsoning the
horizon before his window.

"How can I stay?" she said. "How can I bear to stay?"

She recalled her last words to him as they parted:

"Remember that you are forgotten!"

She recalled his reply:

"Forget that you are remembered!"

She sank down on the floor and crossed her arms on the window sill
and buried her face on her arms. The white dawn approached,
touched her, and passed, and she did not heed.

PART SECOND

I

The home of the Merediths lay in a region of fertile lands adapted
alike to tillage and to pasturage. The immediate neighborhood was
old, as civilization reckons age in the United States, and was well
conserved, It held in high esteem its traditions of itself,
approved its own customs, was proud of its prides: a characteristic
community of country gentlemen at the side of each of whom a
characteristic lady lived and had her peculiar being.

The ownership of the soil had long since passed into the hands of
capable families--with this exception, that here and there between
the borders of large estates little farms were to be found
representing all that remained from slow processes of partition and
absorption. These scant freeholds had thus their pathos, marking
as they did the losing fight of successive holders against more
fortunate, more powerful neighbors. Nothing in its way records
more surely the clash and struggle and ranking of men than the
boundaries of land. There you see extinction and survival, the
perpetual going under of the weak, the perpetual overriding of the
strong.

Two such fragmentary farms lay on opposite sides of the Meredith
estate. One was the property of Ambrose Webb, a married but
childless man who, thus exempt from necessity of raking the earth
for swarming progeny, had sown nearly all his land in grass and
rented it as pasturage: no crops of children, no crops of grain.

The other farm was of less importance. Had you ridden from the
front door of the Merediths northward for nearly a mile, you would
have reached the summit of a slope sweeping a wide horizon.
Standing on this summit any one of these bright summer days, you
could have seen at the foot of the slope, less than a quarter of a
mile away on the