Luther's hesitation in the matter was a trifle nettling to a free agent. He evidently hardly liked to take the responsibility of acting without the autocratic paternal concurrence. Kenniston himself felt the irking of leading-strings. "Cap'n Lucy or no Cap'n Lucy, I'm going," he said to himself, making a dash for liberty, as it were. "I believe the man thinks Cap'n Lucy owns the earth." Luther's obduracy gave way presently, although he persisted in saddling his own horse, also, and accompanying his guest as far as the cross-roads. Kenniston was oppressed with the sense of so punctilious a host, and the long ride in the dewy night, along the deserted roads, under the white silent stars, would have accorded better with his humor had he been solitary. But the freshening wind that came with the daybreak had a sense of liberty in the broad spread of its wings. Under the slow revelation of the clear gray skies of dawn, he marked how far the tumult of its flight extended in the stirring of the forests on the mountain sides, awakening from the lethargies of the night. He experienced a certain quickening interest in the unrolling of an unfamiliar landscape from the obscurities of the darkness. He had a keen zest for its beauty, the splendid symmetry of its setting amidst a new and strange conformation of the mountains; he was responsive, too, to that touch of pensive melancholy, that sense of loss, which one must feel in noting the day-star fade, the quenching of that white, tremulous, supernal lustre in the midst of the roseate mists; but his strong mundane heart stirred to see the sun sail majestically up amidst the full argosy of scarlet and amber clouds, freighted with the future, and the breathless expectation of the quiescent landscape merge into the certainty of largess to the present moment. And he had a yet deeper satisfaction: he noted the inferiority of the magnificence about him to the scene he had left, his own, his very own, and he dwelt upon the recollection of it with a personal triumph, as if he had himself designed and built it. It was with an influx of hopefulness, of content, of renewed interest in the world, that he shook hands with Luther, glad enough to part with him. The mountaineer looked after him with a certain wistfulness. His experience was too limited, his idea of the world beyond too vague, for his thoughts to follow the traveler. It was only the sudden dim perception of that fresh, vital, alert turning to fields beyond his ken that smote upon him with a sense of deprivation or of discontent, too subtle to be definitely discriminated.