By midsummer it was all over with him, and he shocked his own reticent soul by blurting out one day: "I want you to marry me." The words had been shot from him by some inner dynamic force, and at the moment he would have given anything he had could he have taken them back. He waited in terror and very frankly and proudly she lifted her heavy lashes, looked straight into his eyes, and firmly said: "No!" He went away then, but his relief was not what he thought it would be. He could not forget that her mouth quivered slightly, and that there seemed to be a faint weakening in the depths of her eyes when he told her good-by. He could climb no mountain that he did not see her striding as from Olympus down it. He walked by no seashore that he did not see her rising from the waves, and again he went to her, and again he asked. And this time, just as frankly and proudly, she looked him in the eyes and said: "Yes--on one condition." "Name it." "That you don't go to my home and my people for five years." He laughed. "Why, you big, beautiful, silly young person, I know mountains and mountaineers." "Yes--of Europe--but not mine." "Very well," he said, and, not knowing women, he asked: "Why didn't you say 'Yes' the first time?" "I don't know," she said. II She had lifted her voice first, one spring dawn, in a log cabin that clung to the steep bank of Clover Fork, and her wail rose above the rush of its high waters--above the song of a wood-thrush in the top of a poplar high above her. Somewhere her mother had heard the word Juno, and the mere sound of the word appealed to her starved sense of beauty as did one of the old-fashioned flowers she planted in her tiny yard. So the mother gave the child that name and, like the name, the child grew up, tall, slow, and majestic of movement, singularly gentle and quiet, except when aroused, and then her wrath and her might were primeval. St. Hilda, the Mission teacher, was the first from the outside world to be drawn to her. She had stopped in at the cabin on Clover one day to find the mother of the family ill in bed, and twelve-year-old Juno acting as cook and mother for a brood of ten. A few months later she persuaded the father to let the girl come down to her school, and in the succeeding years she became St. Hilda's right hand and the mainstay in the supervision of the kitchen, housework, and laundry, and even in the management of the Mission's farm. No one had the subtle understanding of St. Hilda's charges as had Juno--no one could handle them quite so well. So that it was with real grief and great personal loss that St. Hilda opened the way for Juno to go to school in the Bluegrass. And now, one sunset in mid-May, she was back at the Mission in Happy Valley, and the two were in each other's arms.