the
walnut that he celebrated.

But Maggard did know it had been through the leafage of that splendid
tree that he had first glimpsed the girl's face, and he did know that
never before had he seen a thing of trunk and branch and leaf that had
so impressed him with its stateliness and vital beauty.

If he were master at that house, he thought, he would not cut it down.

"I'm obleeged ter ye fer comin' thus fur with me," he observed, then
supplemented drily, "an' still more fer not comin' no further."

The other laughed. "I hain't ergoin' ter 'cumber yore projeck's none
ternight," he declared, good-humouredly, then added fairly enough, "but
termorrer night _I_ aims ter go sparkin' thar myself--an' I looks ter ye
to do as much fer me an' give me a cl'ar road."

Maggard had hardly reached the house when, with all the passionate
violence of the hills, the tempest broke. Safe inside, he talked and
smoked with the patriarch and his thoughts wandered, as he sat there by
the hearth, back to the room from which now and then drifted a fragment
of plaintively crooning song.

The stag horns over the fireplace and the flintlock gun that lay across
their prongs spoke of days long past, before the deer and bear had been
"dogged to death" in the Cumberlands. There were a few pewter pieces,
too--and these the visitor knew were found only in houses that went back
to revolutionary days.

This, mused Kenneth Thornton, was the best house and the most fertile
farm in all the wild surrounding country, and irony crept into his smile
with the thought that it was a place he could not enter save under an
anonymous threat of death.

By the time supper had been eaten, the storm voices had dwindled from
boisterous violence to exhausted quiet, and even the soft patter of warm
rain died away until through the door, which now stood ajar, the visitor
could see the moonlight and the soft stars that seemed to hang just out
of arm's reach.

Dorothy had slipped quietly into the room and chosen a seat at the
chimney corner where she sat as voiceless as a nun who has taken vows of
silence. Soon the old man's head began to nod in drowsy contentment. At
first he made dutiful resistance against the pleasant temptation of
languor--then succumbed.

The young man, who had been burning with impatience for this moment,
made a pretense of refilling his pipe. Over there out of the direct
flare and leaping of the flames the girl sat in shadow and he wanted t