Toward evening Dale rode back to Arden. His mind was a confusion of happy impressions, the result of having laid its touch upon the throttle of power. From the dusky room where his life had sat wondering, he felt now that a hand had pressed his shoulder, aroused him, and led him to the silver threshold whose outlook was a landscape of golden opportunity. As, twenty-four hours earlier, when his eyes for the first time rapturously feasted on this valley of plenty, so now his mind roamed across a dazzling future—a future which was his, his very own.

Tossing back his head he gave a yell, a wild, joyous yell, that startled the horse and sent scurrying to higher branches an inquisitive squirrel which had been looking down at him with chattering interest.

When he turned into the circle, the Colonel stood up and stretched, welcoming him with an open smile of approval. He could imagine what tact Bob had employed to bring about this new attire, but little did he guess at what sacrifice to personal comfort. For the donation of clothes was not what stamped Bob a philanthropist. He had taken Dale into his room and there prosecuted a stragetic system; voluntarily submitting to Uncle Zack's shears on his hair which required no cutting. Nor was this all. He made the old servant shave him, a thing he despised from any hand but his own. Then he tubbed, and continued this game of follow-the-leader throughout the entire toilette, affably talking all the while, until Dale emerged a different looking, and a much more gratified, man.

"Lawd, Marse Dale," Uncle Zack had exclaimed, "you suah does look handsome! I'se gwine to shave you ever' mawnin' now, till you ketches on for yohse'f!"

The Colonel's smile was immeasurably pleasing to his new guest, and when the old gentleman playfully spoke of fine clothes Dale responded like a happy boy.

"Ain't they fine!" he looked admiringly down at himself. "I reckon I hain't never had on decent clothes before in all my life! D'ye reckon I'll get used ter this collar? Bob said so!"

Under his arm were two books—a speller and a simple reader. These Jane had given him as he left, after an afternoon spent in lessons on the lawn. It was the first lesson, of course; a lesson, perhaps, which both would remember all their lives; vivid to Dale because the tentacles of his mind were beginning to stir and stretch in their new awakening; vivid to her for many reasons. As the day had progressed she became more and more astounded by his ability to learn, for in an incredibly short time he had mastered the first four columns of her spelling book with an ease which made her wonder if he had not before been over it.

Enthusiastically now he related this to the Colonel, who saw that he was trembling—tingling, like a thoroughbred ready for the start in a big race.

"You must use the library for your studies, sir," the old gentleman declared with warmth. "In there you will find a dictionary—if you know how to use one."

"Show me how!" the new student eagerly turned to him.

Laying aside his own volume, a treatise on the calorific power of fuels—a brain-rasping subject which had been absorbing him since the coal fields were in prospect—he led the way into that spacious, mellow room, walled from floor to ceiling with shelves upon shelves of books. Dale stood transfixed. His head was thrown back and his hands were clenched, as though in very truth the secrets of this silent store-house were already creeping out to enter his attentive brain. Colonel May opened the clumsy dictionary, explaining it with a word the mountaineer had already learned to spell, and left him in this paradise of fancies.

Some time later Uncle Zack opened the library door, announced dinner, and left unheard. A few minutes after this he returned, but again left unheard, and only when a hand pressed Dale's arm did the young man look up. The Colonel was smiling down at him.

"Come, Sam Johnson. Dr. Jared Sparks, Ben Franklin, Davy Crockett, Abe Lincoln, and more such indomitable shades rolled into one! Man must eat; it is time for dinner!"

"What does that mean?" he asked, leaning back in his chair.

"Oh, Lord," the Colonel groaned. "I'll tell you another time. Come! You understand 'dinner,' I hope?"

Entering the dining room Dale's mind was like a country pup walking stiff-legged into a crowd of city dogs, its hair belligerently on end and the tip of its tail wagging a friendly compromise. Not that he was at all defiant, and of course not afraid, but his whole mental attitude had become one of alert watchfulness, ready to spring this way or that, to follow this new custom or that new custom, and not intending to lag if the others made a move. So it was that when the Colonel held a chair back for Miss Liz, and Bob was seating Jane, Dale, who never in his life had seen anything of this sort, made a pretense of imitating them for the convenience of Ann;—and even though she were rudely jolted by the violence with which he shoved her into the table, her appreciative smile made him determine to do this thing forever.

"How will you have your coffee, Mr. Dawson?" Miss Liz presently asked—for dinner at the Colonel's was of the farm variety which scorned the demitasse.

"A mite of long sweetenin', please Ma'm," he answered to that lady's utter consternation. She laid down the tongs and stared at him.

"He'll take it as you fix Bob's, Miss Liz," Jane interposed readily enough to save the situation, and at the next opportunity she turned in a confidential undertone: "We don't use 'long sweetening' down here, Dale. People in the valleys use sugar exclusively—'short sweetening,' as you call it. They don't have to grind and stew up corn-stalks to get sorghum for their coffee, as we used to do. But I remember how good that molasses—that 'long sweetening'—was," she added, lying for the benefit of charity. "Don't forget, they use 'short sweetening' all the time here in coffee, but they never call it anything but sugar. While on the subject of customs I want to correct you about something else. Today, over home, you stood in the drive and halloed for Bob till he came out for you. That isn't done in the settlements. Here you can walk right up to anybody's front door and knock, or ring the bell, without the slightest fear of having a rifle poked through a chink because people may take you for an enemy. Of course, your way is the proper and polite thing to do where we come from, but in the valley it isn't good etiquette."

"What's etiquette?" he asked.

She explained it and continued:

"The etiquette of knives and forks and spoons also materially differs between our people and these."

"I never seed one of these little fellers before," he picked up a teaspoon and turned it curiously over.

"I didn't either," she laughed, "until I went to the convent. But now, since I'm to be your teacher, you must let me teach you these things, too."

"I want ye to teach me everything in the world," he whispered.

"Then watch how I use them," she replied, flushing at the way he said this, "and which ones I use. Down here, people who eat with their knives are murdered—I mean socially murdered. Break—" she was about to say: break all the commandments before doing this! but thought better of it and added: "yourself of that habit the very first—the very first thing you do. And I want to hear more of that good English you say you know," she laughed at him. "You've been talking atrociously all day!"

"What's atrociously?" he asked.

"I don't see Brent," Miss Liz raised her lorgnette. "Is he ill?"

"No, my dear," the Colonel answered, "he is otherwise engaged and cannot be with us."

"John," the good woman stared severely across at him, "I believe that boy is working too hard! You must prevail upon him to take more rest."

A bomb exploding could scarcely have produced more surprise, yet one could never know just at what point Miss Liz would "break out"—as Zack called it. In the midst of their spellbound silence Ann giggled, and Jane managed to say:

"That would be rather difficult, wouldn't it, Miss Liz?—I mean, persuading him to take more rest?"

"Well, your father must try," she insisted; for, when very much in earnest, Miss Liz impartially denoted the Colonel as father to whomsoever she might be speaking.

"He's makin' a railroad, ain't he?" Dale turned to Ann. "Do ye reckon he'll show me how?"

"He'll turn it all over to you, no doubt!—he'll have to turn it over to someone if it gets built! It only shows, Daddy," she laughed across to the Colonel, "that one can't serve a corporation and a goddess both at the same time! Isn't that a natty little epigram?"

"I don't follow the subject of your epigram," the Colonel smiled.

"Why, Brent, and the goddess, and the railroad," she replied.

"Goddess, my dear? What goddess?"

She and Jane exchanged glances.

"He's suspected of having a love somewhere; some mysterious love whom he meets in the moonlit forest of Arden—when it's moonlight; and, maybe, when it isn't."

"What have you to support this?" the old gentleman frowned. He, too, had sometimes wondered what took Brent away so frequently of late. These were uncomfortable thoughts to the Colonel, who allowed suspicions no place in his estimate of people.

"Oh, we just support it for the sake of gossip," she laughed. "Aunt Timmie dreamed it, I believe."

"I thought you were serious," he smiled, yet showing his distaste for the subject, "nor will I permit any gossiping here!"

"But, Heavens, Daddy—"

"My dear," he interrupted her, "I trust you will never learn to gossip. It is purely a trade, carried on by a breed of fawning Judases—of self-satisfied butchers, to deal in the choicest cuts of their unsuspecting friends' characters. The shelter of my roof must also afford protection to the good name of my guest."

"'Good name' in the present instance is hardly a calculable statement," she murmured, for Ann could be biting, as well as sweet, when her feelings were touched.

"I quite agree with John," Miss Liz arose to the occasion. "It is strange," she added, turning the lorgnette this time carefully at Jane, "that he does not find a nice young girl to marry."

"Such a cynosure of niceness, too," Ann added her little dig, and Jane suggested:

"He might try advertising!"

"What's advertising?" Dale asked.

"Oh, Lord," the Colonel exploded into his napkin.

When dinner was over, Jane crossed the porch unnoticed and walked out under the trees. The lorgnette which had said to her "it is strange he does not find some nice girl to marry," left a disquieting effect. Ann had only that day suggested the same idea, and Bob had laughed to her about it the previous evening. Even Aunt Timmie, the ebony font of wisdom, had but recently looked slyly at her, remarking: "'Foh long we's gwine to have a weddin' in a private cyar!" (Aunt Timmie had never seen a private car, but it typified her idea of grandeur). She now strolled on beneath the trees, beneath giant clinging wild grape and trumpet vines, to a circle of low spreading cedars, wherein lay a carpet of odorous tanbark. It was a favorite spot with her.

Gliding carefully through the meeting branches which hid the path, she dropped into a yielding hammock and gazed for several minutes up at the network of black limbs, watching a star here and there which showed in a few small patches of visible sky. One arm stretched down at full length until her fingers touched the ground, and in this way she was keeping the hammock gently in motion.

She made a wonderfully graceful shadow, reclining in this dark place, and no judge of the human form could have passed without a quick breath of admiration for its delicate blending of strength and frailty, its stamp of being thoroughbred. And it was along the line of thoroughbreds that her thoughts were wandering.

Having acquired much of the Colonel's reliance in breeding, and in the fitness of appropriately mated things, she was wondering! Her father and mother had been illiterate mountaineers, but did there not exist a time prior to this when their ancestors were people of refinement? This, she felt, must be surely so, because of her early love of refined things—truly refined, to a degree far beyond the ken of mountain life. Without substantiating records, she seemed to know that in early Colonial days her family of gentle blood had floated with the migratory tide across the Appalachian range. That was the origin of all mountaineers! What had held some there, instead of sending them on to the rich, unsurveyed plains? A birth enroute? That sometimes happened. The man of the family died, or was killed, and the woman forced to build a shelter as best she might until the boys grew big enough to help? That, too, had happened. Whatever the reason, some of the best Anglo-Saxon stock had been stranded in the Cumberlands, staying there literally and figuratively while the world advanced.

Perhaps her strain was purer than the Colonel's! Few mountaineers made alien marriages, for the very sufficient reason that they seldom roamed—even though this had meant stagnation in their own environment. Still, the strain was pure! If one occasionally escaped these mountain fastnesses, why should he not—why should she not—with a free rein, dash out to regain lost prestige? Why should she not with one stroke blot out five or six generations of ignorance, and bring the stifled line of her honorable ancestry to the place it had been rightfully demanding for a century? But, in the face of uncertainties, would her blood commingled with the blood of established lineage now be fair? Would she ever feel a rebuke in infant eyes? Would they not burn her soul if she wantonly summoned them to open on a world which might point back with a superior smile? Could she ever kiss the little lips which might some day praise the father and be silent of her?

Thus her sensitive thoughts, bringing a succession of confusions, wandered dreamily on, while the hammock gradually ceased its swinging and hung as a thing asleep.