mean--and yet we get lonesome--for somebody to talk to--about
those things."

There was a pause, and then as Happy explained, the seeming serenity of
her manner was a supreme test of self-effacement which deserved an
accolade for bravery.

"I'd heard it hinted--that you thought a heap of a girl--down below--I
thought maybe you'd like to tell me about her."

How should he know that words so simply spoken in the timbre of calm
naturalness came from a heart that was agonized?

How could he guess that the quiet figure sitting in the low chair was
suffering inexpressible pain, or that the eyes that looked out through
half-closed lids seemed to see a world of rocking hills, black under
clouds of an unrelieved hopelessness?

One who has come braced for an ordeal and finds that he has reared for
himself a fictitious trouble, can realize in the moment of reaction only
the vast elation of relief.

Had her acting been less perfect, he might have caught a shadowing forth
of the truth--but, as it was, he only felt that shackles had been
knocked from him, and that he stood a free man.

So he made a clean breast of how Anne had become his ideal; how he had
fought that discovery as an absurdly impossible love, and how for that
reason he had never before spoken of his feelings. But he did not, of
course, intimate that it had been Anne herself who had finally given him
a right to hope.

Happy listened in sympathetic silence, and when he was through she said,
still softly:

"Boone, I reckon you've got a right hopeful life-span stretching out
ahead of you--but are you sure you aren't fixing to break your heart,
boy? Don't those folks down there--hold themselves mighty high? Don't
they--sort of--look down on us mountain people?"

It was a fair question, yet one which he could not answer without
betraying Anne's stout assertion of reciprocated feeling. He could only
nod his head and declare, "A feller must take his chances, I reckon."

From the dark forests the whippoorwills called in those plaintive notes
that reach the heart. Down by the creek the frogs boomed out, and
platinum mists lay dreamily between their soft emphases of shadow. Boone
was thinking of the girl whose star hung there in the sky. His heart was
singing in elation, "She loves me and, thank God, Happy understands,
too. My way lies clear!" He was not reflecting just then that princesses
have often spoken as boldly as Anne had done, at sixteen, and have been
for