d, and
they did not understand. I had to meet their last embraces under the
eyes of the motley crowd who had come to the station to see the train,
and under such conditions I dared not show emotion. Again they did not
understand and were a little hurt by my coldness. I sprang up the car
steps jauntily. To show my independence I stood by the smoker door and
waved a smiling farewell to the silent, wondering three. I did not
wait there, as they waited, looking after me, but turned, tossed my new
bag into a rack, threw myself into a seat, and crossed my legs with the
nonchalance of one who left home every day.

The river travelled with me out of the valley. I looked from the car
window and saw it at my side, and together we went away. I was silent,
wondering at the shadow which seemed to overcast the earth. The little
river was bright in the noonday sun--a cheery fellow-traveller through
the green land. I leaned from the car window in the suddenly born hope
that I might see the three still figures, back there in the hot glare
of the station. But the river had turned, and I saw not the roofs of
Pleasantville dozing in the sun like the very dogs, nor the court-house
tower and the tall steeples that pierced her shade, but a high wall of
mountains. We seemed to be driving straight for their heart. The
river's mood was mine. It shrank from that forbidding wall and the
mysteries beyond; it swept in a wide curve into pleasant lowlands. And
now I looked across it northward, to other mountains--to _my_
mountains, to the friendly heights that watched over _my_ valley.
Closing my eyes I saw it as on that morning when Penelope and I rode in
terror from the woods. I looked across it as it lay in the broad day,
under the kindly eye of God, across the rolling green, checkered with
the white of blossoming orchards and the brown of the fallow, past the
village spires and up the long slope to the roof among the giant oaks.
You've had enough, the river seemed to say; and, turning, it charged
boldly into the other mountain's heart. I went with it, but my face
was pressed against the pane, that those who travelled with me might
not see.

CHAPTER VIII

Harlansburg, with practical sense, shields itself from northern winds
by a high hill, spreading over the barren southern slope. Trade clings
to the river-front, in a compact mass around the square, and from there
the town rises, scattering as it climbs, and the higher it