ng
listlessly in her lap and her eyes staringly fixed on the blaze of her
hearth. Their amber pools were darkened with jaded misery and her
cheeks were pale. Their graciousness of youthful curve had been
somewhat flattened, as her whole life had been flattened. Only her
hair, awakened into halo-brightness by the blaze of the logs, spoke of
that old vividness of color that had been a sort of delicate
gorgeousness and even that nimbus had the suggestion of the glow about
the head of a saint who has achieved sanctity through suffering.

"He swore he aimed ter come back ter me right soon," she repeated to
herself. "I wouldn't have him imperil himself--but he mout have writ me
a letter." Her instinct told her what had happened with a fulness of
realization from which there was no escape. It was only because she had
pretended her Cinderella dream to be a fact, that she had not all along
recognized it for an impossible fairy tale. The Jerry Henderson who had
promised her marriage was only a temporary Jerry: a man swept off his
feet by the stress and freshet of crisis. The mountain blood in his
veins had welled up to flood tide and swept away the dams of his
superimposed cultivation. He had relapsed into her life--for a little
while--just as his ardent tongue had relapsed into her uncouth
vernacular.

Now the more permanent Jerry, awakened by his return to city
conditions, was standing aloof, regarding that experience with
self-contemptuous regret: thinking of it as a lapse into savagery. It
had been an impetuous thing of the flesh to which his mind denied
permanent sanction. The dream was over now--but she could not forget
it.

Her fingers twisted themselves tightly together and she rose and leaned
wearily against the mantel-shelf. As her eyes, clouded with misery,
traveled about the tidy room, its every note spoke of Bear Cat Stacy.
He had fashioned, for her comfort, all the furnishings that made it a
place different from the rooms of other mountain cabins.

On the Pelion of her own misery she heaped the Ossa of
self-condemnation. She saw again the stricken look in Turner's eyes as
he had set out for Virginia after hearing the news that had cut the
foundation from under all his own life-dream. She remembered, too, the
gentleness with which, placing thought of her above self, he had made
his renunciation.

"Oh, God," she murmured, "why air hit thet we kain't love best of all
ther folks thet loves us most? Turney would h