No one in the mountains, however, fully appreciated the impulse that had controlled him except Alethea. To her it served as a sacred apotheosis, and she adored his memory for what he might have been, and forgot what he was. Often, when the spring bloomed, or the summer was flushing with the wild roses and the roseate dawns and the red sunset-tides, she hearkened to the mocking-bird’s singing, thrice—thrice the mystic strain, and she was wont to go and search for her lover at their tryst among the crags. And when she would come back, her face so full of peace, her eyes softly luminous, her drawling formula, “Jest been talkin’ with Reuben ’mongst the rocks,” pervaded with tranquil joy, her step-mother and Mrs. Jessup would whisper apart and look askance upon her, and start at any sudden jar or sound, as if it were instinct with her spectre lover’s freakish presence. And so, patient drudge though she was, they listened to Mrs. Purvine’s eager insistence to have her bide in the cove; and although she went to live with this cheery soul, it was with tears and sighs and sadness to leave the clifty gorges that he haunted. But she found the mocking-bird singing there, thrice, thrice the mystic strain, amongst the rocky banks of the Scolacutta River. And so she smiled again. Except for this delusion she gave little indication of the unsettling of her mind. She was placidly happy with her aunt, though the two women were much alone, for Jerry Price presently married Sophy Griff. He became the sole dependence of the miller and his grandchildren, but a measure of Mrs. Purvine’s jaunty prosperity seemed to follow him. Old Griff’s little log cabin took on a more pretentious guise, and there was a slipshod thrift within. Jerry lifted the mill-stones and rebuilt the mill, and the whir began anew as if it had never left off; and the old miller sat without the door, and listened, and grew garrulous and cheerful and dusty with meal and flour, and brightened into some faint reflection of his old imperative self. Tad never reappeared from the moonshiners’ lair, and they still successfully elude the law. The failure to secure their testimony proved no disaster to Gwinnan, as the chancellor held that a duel is a matter of deliberate and formal arrangement between men who recognize both the nature of the proceeding and the law infringed. Nevertheless, Gwinnan was not satisfied. He had never regarded the matter as a duel; he had forgotten even the circumstances. Once brought forcibly to his mind, he dissented from the decision of the case, which he had watched more as if from the bench than from the bar. He resigned when reinstated.