t Boone doubted whether he
could in style or vigour of thought have bettered this casual writing.
As Boone read it, the portrait of a great soldier stood before his eyes.
He had never guessed until then how great a soldier had been cut off by
Dinwiddie's suicide. Now he could perceive why other governments,
governments which might some day meet Britain in the field, had drawn
sighs of relief at his death. So in a greater degree the world had
breathed easier when Bonaparte went to St. Helena.

Yet of Dinwiddie, McCalloway had not written flatteries. Rather his
portraiture was strong because his brush stroke was so strict and severe
that often it became adverse criticism.

Boone leaned back and drew from his pocket the key that would unlock an
answer to his questionings. He thrust it into the keyhole and then, as a
spasm of pain crossed his face, hesitated.

Once he had done that, he should have admitted to himself that he had
abandoned hope, and he realized that he could not bring himself, even
after five years, to that admission.

For a long while he sat hesitant. A squirrel chattered; a woodpecker
rapped high overhead on a dead limb, and at last the young man thrust
the key back into his pocket and carried the metal strong box into the
house again, unopened.

Boone had ordained it as his law that when thoughts of Anne came into
his mind, he would not entertain them; that a seal had been placed on
those closed pages of his experience; but it was a law which he had no
power of enforcing on his heart, and as he came out again into the
sunlight he was thinking of her.

He had never known in its true baldness the dependence of mother and
daughter upon the bounteous generosity of their kinsman, and without
that knowledge he had not guessed that Anne's departure from Louisville
had been an adventure, daring everything.

All that he knew, or fancied he knew, was that even when she had broken
with Morgan she had felt no need of him, and it had been her callous
wish to live as if she had never known him. Since love is set in the
most delicate and intricate bearings of life, and holds in its own core
the possibilities of hate, he fancied that he felt for the Anne Masters
of his past adoration the present contempt due a woman who had been able
only to trifle with a life she had shaped. Because, too, she had once
saved that life from its threatened smirching, the gratitude which
might have been his most treasured sentiment