his belly
toward a heap of dead leaves caught by the brush of an old fallen pine,
he crept beneath them and lay still. His aunt did not stir. Patting her
horse's neck, she sat and waited until the voices drew nearer, came
close beneath her as the road wound, and passed on. Then she once more
moved along toward her cabin.

CHAPTER IV

DAVID SPENDS HIS FIRST DAY AT HIS CABIN, AND FRALE MAKES HIS CONFESSION

Doctor Hoyle had built his cabin on one of the pinnacles of the earth,
and David, looking down on blue billowing mountain tops with only the
spaces of the air between him and heaven--between him and the
ocean--between him and his fair English home--felt that he knew why the
old doctor had chosen it.

Seated on a splint-bottomed chair in the doorway, pondering, he thought
first of his mother, with a little secret sorrow that he could not have
taken to his heart the bride she had selected for him, and settled in
his own home to the comfortable ease the wife's wealth would have
secured for him. It was not that the money had been made in commerce; he
was neither a snob nor a cad. Although his own connections entitled him
to honor, what more could he expect than to marry wealth and be happy,
if--if happiness could come to either of them in that way. No, his heart
did not lean toward her; it was better that he should bend to his
profession in a strange land. But not this, to live a hermit's life in a
cabin on a wild hilltop. How long must it be--how long?

Brooding thus, he gazed at the distance of ever paling blue, and
mechanically counted the ranges and peaks below him. An inaccessible
tangle of laurel and rhododendron clothed the rough and precipitous wall
of the mountain side, which fell sheer down until lost in purple shadow,
with a mantle of green, deep and rich, varied by the gray of the
lichen-covered rocks, the browns and reds of the bare branches of
deciduous trees, and the paler tints of feathery pines. Here and there,
from damp, springy places, dark hemlocks rose out of the mass, tall and
majestic, waving their plumy tops, giant sentinels of the wilderness.

Gradually his mood of brooding retrospect changed, and he knew himself
to be glad to his heart's core. He could understand why, out of the
turmoil of the Middle Ages, men chose to go to sequestered places and
become hermits. No tragedies could be in this primeval spot, and here he
would rest and build again for the future. He was pleased to sit