ls his place in life in
the letters he writes, no less than in the words he speaks, or the
clothing he wears. As Sammy rode slowly through the pinery and
down the narrow Fall Creek valley, she was thinking of these
things, thinking of these things seriously.

The girl had been in a way conscious of the gradual change in
Ollie's life, as it had been revealed in his letters, but she had
failed to connect the change with her lover. The world into which
young Stewart had gone, and by which he was being formed, was so
foreign to the only world known to Sammy, that, while she realized
in a dim way that he was undergoing a transformation, she still
saw him in her mind as the backwoods boy. With the announcement of
his return, and the thought that she would soon meet him face to
face, it burst upon her suddenly that her lover was a stranger.
The man who wrote this letter was not the man whom she had
promised to marry. Who was he?

Passing the mill and the blacksmith shop, the brown pony with his
absorbed rider began to climb the steep road to the Matthews
place. Half way up the hill, the little horse, stepping on a loose
stone, stumbled, catching himself quickly.

As a flash of lightning on a black night reveals well known
landmarks and familiar objects, this incident brought back to
Sammy the evening when, with Ollie and Young Matt, she had climbed
the same way; when her horse had stumbled and her face had come
close to the face of the big fellow whose hand was on the pony's
neck. The whole scene came before her with a vividness that was
startling; every word, every look, every gesture of the two young
men, her own thoughts and words, the objects along the road, the
very motion of her horse; she seemed to be actually living again
those moments of the past. But more than this, she seemed not only
to live again the incidents of that evening, but in some strange
way to possess the faculty of analyzing and passing judgment upon
her own thoughts and words.

Great changes had come to Sammy, too, since that night when her
lover had said good-by. And now, in her deeper life, the young
woman felt a curious sense of shame, as she saw how trivial were
the things that had influenced her to become Ollie's promised
wife. She blushed, as she recalled the motives that had sent her
to the shepherd with the request that he teach her to be a fine
lady.

Coming out on top of the ridge, Brownie stopped of his own accord,
and the girl saw