ods
where there was no path, both of us silent. We rode through tremulous,
shining leaves--Grayson's horse choosing a way for himself--and,
threshing through a patch of high, strong weeds, we circled past an
amphitheatre of deadened trees whose crooked arms were tossed out into
the moonlight, and halted on the spur. The moon was poised over
Morris's farm; South Fork was shining under us like a loop of gold, the
mountains lay about in tranquil heaps, and the moon-mist rose luminous
between them. There Grayson turned to me with an eager light in his
eyes that I had never seen before.

"This has a new beauty to-night!" he said; and then "I told her about
you, and she said that she used to know you--well." I was glad my face
was in shadow--I could hardly keep back a brutal laugh--and Grayson,
unseeing, went on to speak of her as I had never heard any man speak of
any woman. In the end, he said that she had just promised to be his
wife. I answered nothing. Other men, I knew, had said that with the
same right, perhaps, and had gone from her to go back no more. And I
was one of them. Grayson had met her at White Sulphur five years
before, and had loved her ever since. She had known it from the first,
he said, and I guessed then what was going to happen to him. I
marvelled, listening to the man, for it was the star of constancy in
her white soul that was most lustrous to him--and while I wondered the
marvel became a commonplace. Did not every lover think his loved one
exempt from the frailty that names other women? There is no ideal of
faith or of purity that does not live in countless women to-day. I
believe that; but could I not recall one friend who walked with
Divinity through pine woods for one immortal spring, and who, being
sick to death, was quite finished--learning her at last? Did I not
know lovers who believed sacred to themselves, in the name of love,
lips that had been given to many another without it? And now did I not
know--but I knew too much, and to Grayson I said nothing.

That spring the "boom" came. Grayson's property quadrupled in value
and quadrupled again. I was his lawyer, and I plead with him to sell;
but Grayson laughed. He was not speculating; he had invested on
judgment; he would sell only at a certain figure. The figure was
actually reached, and Grayson let half go. The boom fell, and Grayson
took the tumble with a jest. It would come again in the autumn, he
said, and he went