Or was it the quiver
of the coach over the gravel in the road and the swaying of their seat?
The sense of danger which the little incident roused was only
momentary. The scenes through which they were passing were resistless.
He caught the odour of crushed violets from the fence corner and the
smell of the young grass broken beneath the hoof of a horse; the
ploughman was turning at the end of the row. The low music of the river
and the panorama of white fleeting clouds across the blue of matchless
southern skies, awoke a thousand memories. Again he was a Southern boy.
He heard the laughter of big-mouthed, jolly negroes eating watermelons
in the shade of great trees and the song of mocking birds in the
stillness of summer nights!

A rabbit ran across the road and he smiled at the recollection of his
first hunt. A quail whistled from the tangle of blackberry briars by
the roadside. He looked quickly and saw the bob white sitting on the
top rail of the old worn fence.

He seized Nan's arm.

"Look, Nan!"

She looked and smiled and the tears came unbidden. She turned away a
moment and he didn't see.

They spent the night at the same old road-house and slept on feather
beds. He hadn't felt the touch of a feather bed in years. He dreamed
that he was at school again, a man of thirty-five, playing marbles with
a crowd of towheaded boys and they were beating him at the game while
Nan was standing near, her long plait of black hair hanging down her
back, laughing at him because he was barefooted! He woke with a groan,
shook off the nightmare, and slept soundly until morning.

They started next day at eight o'clock with the pack-horses to make the
trip along the dim bridle trail, fourteen miles up the sides of
frowning cliffs and over the tops of balsam-crowned peaks to the summit
of Mount Mitchell.

Nan led the way, mounted on a sure-footed young stallion, and Stuart
followed her on a little black mule he had selected from the barn for
his exact likeness to one he had raised as a pet when a boy. The
youngsters came struggling after them, mounted on an assortment of
shaggy, scrubby looking animals that knew the mountain path as a rabbit
knows his trail in the jungle.

They stopped for luncheon at the spring which forms the source of the
Swannanoa and Stuart drank again from its cold limpid waters, while
Nan's laughter rang in his ears.

At one o'clock they passed through the first series of clouds and out
into the sunl