n, watching them questioningly, stupidly. They felt stiff and numb.
Suddenly he leaned forward exhausted. His head rolled on the desk.
"Sally?" he whimpered, in a furtive, scared way, "Sally?"

Then, all in a moment, he jumped to his feet, clutching at the pocket
that held the Grierson letter, while words came from his mouth in
vehement staccato yelps:

"Eh, God! He'll go against me, will he? Wait. I'll show him. Who's got
the Tigmores? Answer me that now? Who's got the Tigmores?" Off beyond
his window tumbled the long Tigmore line. He crossed the room, all his
strength back with him, and looked out upon the high black hills. "Eh,
God!" he shouted, and beat at his chest where the letter lay, "Dead men
tell no tales! _I've got the Tigmores!_"

_Chapter Eleven_

TALL THINGS

One late fall afternoon a man and a boy lingered under the shadow of
tall trees and pondered tall things. The boy was propped against the
trunk of an oak; his hat was pushed back from his face; his black
tumbling hair made his slim brown face seem browner, his long eyes
darker than they were; his young intensities of fancy and feeling were
aroused, and manifest in the tremble of his lip, the vibrancy of his
voice, the shaking light of his glance. The man lay flat on his back
with a book spread out over his stomach and his long white fingers
interlaced across the book fondly. Down at their feet the Di flowed
swiftly, with the eyrie shiver on her bosom, making haste, like a
frightened woman, past the lonely Tigmores toward the livelier corn and
cotton lands. All around the horizon the sky so throbbed that here and
there it rent the sheer cloud-veil that lay in delicate illusion over
the blue. Through the trees played frightened flashes of colour, the
whisk of a cardinal's wing, the burnt-red plume of a fox-squirrel's
tail. In the air there was a palpitancy that was to the dream senses
what colour vibrations are to the eye.

The man took up the book and began to read from it, and this was the
burden of the reading:

"'Nobody can pretend to explain in detail the whole enigma of first
love. But a general explanation is suggested by evolutional
philosophy,--namely, that the attraction depends upon an inherited
individual susceptibility to special qualities of feminine influence,
and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition,'" the
man smiled gravely and repeated the last stave with questioning care,
"'and subjectively re