Just what that companionship meant to the young man he did not stop to analyze at first. He knew he was happy with Amanda, enjoyed her conversation, felt a bond between them in their love for the vast outdoors, but he never went beyond that. Until one day in early November when he was walking down the lonely road after a pleasant evening with Amanda. He paused once to look up at the stars, remembering what the girl had said concerning them, how they comforted and inspired her. A sudden rush of feeling came to him as he leaned on the rail fence and looked up.... "Look here," he told himself, "it's time you take account of yourself. What's all this friendship with your old companion leading to? Do you love Amanda?" The "stars in their courses" seemed to twinkle her name, every leafless tree along the road she loved seemed to murmur it to him--Amanda! It was suddenly the sweetest name in the whole world to him! "Oh, I know it now!" he said softly to himself under the quiet sky. "I love her! What a woman she is! What a heart she has, what a heart! I want her for my wife; she's the only one I want to have with me 'Till death us do part'--that's a fair test. Why, I've been wondering why I enjoyed each minute with her and just longed to get to see her as often as possible--fool, not to recognize love when it came to me! But I know it now! I'm as sure of it as I am sure those stars, her stars, are shining up there in the sky." As he stood a moment silently looking into the starry heavens some portion of an old story came to him. "My love is as fair as the stars and well-nigh as remote and inaccessible." Could he win the love of a girl like Amanda Reist? She gave him her friendship freely, would she give her love also? A woman like Amanda could never be satisfied with half-gods, she would love as she did everything else--intensely, entirely! He remembered reading that propinquity often led people into mistakes, that constant companionship was liable to awaken a feeling that might masquerade as love. Well, he'd be fair to her, he'd let separation prove his love. "That's just what I'll do," he decided. "Next week I'm to go on my vacation and I'll be gone two weeks. I'll not write to her and of course I won't see her. Perhaps 'Absence will make the heart grow fonder' with her. I hope so! It will be a long two weeks for me, but when I come back--" He flung out his arms to the night as though they could bring to him at once the form of the one he loved. So it happened that after a very commonplace goodbye given to Amanda in the presence of the entire Reist household Martin Landis left Lancaster County a few weeks before Thanksgiving and journeyed to South Carolina to spend a quiet vacation at a mountain resort.