feels
himself to be no longer a boy and nobody else considers him a man.

David did not know where he was going or what he meant to do. He was
blindly striding up the river bank away from Ruth, fairly aflame with
the determination to do something--anything--to prove his manhood. For
nothing ever makes a boy resolve quite so suddenly and firmly to become
a man instantly as to be treated by a girl as he had been by Ruth. Had
the most desperate danger then come in David's way, he would have hailed
and hazarded it with delight. But he could not think of anything to
overwhelm her with just at that moment, and so he could only stride on
in helpless, angry silence. Ruth flew after him as if her thin white
skirts had been strong, swift wings. She overtook him before he had gone
very far, and clung to him again more than ever like some beautiful
white spirit of the woods wreathed in mist, with her soft blown garments
and her softer blown hair. She merely wound herself around him at first,
breathless and panting. But as soon as she caught her breath the
coaxing, the laughing, and the crying came all together. David kept from
looking down as long as he could, but his pace slackened and his arm
again relaxed. Finally--taken off guard--he glanced at the face so near
his breast. The dusk could not dim its beauty and only made it more
lovely. No more resistance was possible for him--or for any man or
boy--who saw Ruth as she looked then. David's big rough hand was now
surrendered meekly enough to the quick clasp of her little fingers,
and--forgetting all the daring deeds that he meant to do--he was led
like any lamb up the hill to the open door of Cedar House.

II

THE HOUSE OF CEDAR

So far as they knew, there was no tie of blood or relationship binding
them to the kind people of Cedar House. Yet it was the only home that
they could remember and very dear to them both.

It was a great square of rough, dark logs, and seemed now, seen through
the uncertain light, to stand in the centre of a shadowy hamlet, so many
smaller cabins were clustered around it. The custom of the country was
to add cabin after cabin as the family outgrew the original log house.
The instinct of safety, the love of kindred, and the longing for society
in the perilous loneliness of the wilderness held these first
Kentuckians very close together. So that as their own villages thus grew
around them and only their own dwelt near them, they naturally be