am tempted to
forget the boy-and-girl anchorings in the past. Have you no sense of the
fitness of things--no shame?"

"Not very much of either, I guess," he said quite calmly. "Love hasn't
any shame; and it doesn't concern itself much about the fitness of
anything but its object."

And then he bade her good night and went his way with a lilting song of
triumph in his heart which not even the chilling rebuff of the
leave-taking was sufficient to silence.

"She loves me! She would still love me if she were ten times Vincent
Farley's wife!" he said, over and over to himself; the words were on his
lips when he fell asleep, and they were still ringing in his ears the
next morning at dawn-break when he rose and made ready to go to ride
with her.

XXV

THE PLOW IN THE FURROW

One of Miss Ardea Dabney's illuminating graces was the ability to return
easily and amicably to the _status quo ante bellum_; to "kiss and be
friends," in the unfettered phrase of Margaret Catherwood, her chum and
room-mate at Carroll College.

Wherefore, when Tom, mounted on Saladin, overtook her on the morning
next after the night of offenses, she greeted him quite as if nothing
had happened, challenging him gaily to a gallop with the valley head for
its goal, and refusing to be drawn into anything more serious than
joyous persiflage until they were returning at a walk down a
boulder-strewn wood road at the back of the Dabney horse pasture. Then,
and not till then, was the question of Nancy Bryerson's future suffered
to present itself.

For Miss Dabney the question was settled before it came up for
discussion. In the Major's young manhood Deer Trace had maintained a
pack of foxhounds, and it was the Major's bride, a city-bred Charleston
belle, who first objected to the dooryard kennels and the clamor of the
dogs. Back of the horse pasture, and a hundred yards vertical above the
road Ardea and Tom were traversing, a pocket-like glen indented the
mountain side, and in this glen the kennels had been established, with
a substantial log cabin for the convenience of the dog-keeper.

Dogs and dog-keeper had long since gone the way of most of the old-time
Southern manorial largenesses; but the cabin still stood solidly planted
in the midst of its overgrown garden patch, with a dense thicket of
mountain laurel backgrounding it, and a giant tulip-tree standing
sentinel over a gate hanging by one rusted hinge.

This was what Tom saw when he