olks," she said, "fit fer the Union--as we say down there,"
she added with a smile.

So that gradually he began to realize that the Appalachian Range, while
being parts of the Southern States, was not of them at all, but was a
region _sui generis_, and that its inhabitants were the only Americans
who had never swerved in fealty to the flag.

By midsummer it was all over with him, and he shocked his own reticent
soul by blurting out one day: "I want you to marry me." The words had
been shot from him by some inner dynamic force, and at the moment he
would have given anything he had could he have taken them back. He
waited in terror and very frankly and proudly she lifted her heavy
lashes, looked straight into his eyes, and firmly said:

"No!"

He went away then, but his relief was not what he thought it would be. He
could not forget that her mouth quivered slightly, and that there seemed
to be a faint weakening in the depths of her eyes when he told her good-by.
He could climb no mountain that he did not see her striding as from Olympus
down it. He walked by no seashore that he did not see her rising from the
waves, and again he went to her, and again he asked. And this time, just
as frankly and proudly, she looked him in the eyes and said:

"Yes--on one condition."

"Name it."

"That you don't go to my home and my people for five years." He laughed.

"Why, you big, beautiful, silly young person, I know mountains
and mountaineers."

"Yes--of Europe--but not mine."

"Very well," he said, and, not knowing women, he asked:

"Why didn't you say 'Yes' the first time?"

"I don't know," she said.

II

She had lifted her voice first, one spring dawn, in a log cabin that clung
to the steep bank of Clover Fork, and her wail rose above the rush of its
high waters--above the song of a wood-thrush in the top of a poplar high
above her. Somewhere her mother had heard the word Juno, and the mere
sound of the word appealed to her starved sense of beauty as did one of
the old-fashioned flowers she planted in her tiny yard. So the mother
gave the child that name and, like the name, the child grew up, tall,
slow, and majestic of movement, singularly gentle and quiet, except
when aroused, and then her wrath and her might were primeval.

St. Hilda, the Mission teacher, was the first from the outside world to
be drawn to her. She had stopped in at the cabin on Clover one day to find
the mother of the family ill in bed, a