He stopped back a pace--his big body huge above her slenderness--stepped away from the very nearness of her. But as she lifted her arms to him he began to shake his head--the old stubborn refusal that had answered her a countless number of times before. "Aren't we?" she said again, but her voice sounded very small and bodiless and forlorn in the half dark room. He swung one arm in a stiff gesture that embraced the entire valley. "They're all sure, too," his voice grated hoarsely, "They're all sure, too--just as sure as we could ever be--and there's a whole town of them!" She was bending silently over the table, retying the bundle, when he crossed back to her side, a lighted lantern dangling in one hand. "I don't know why myself," he tried to explain. "I only know I've got to wait. And I don't even know what I'm waiting for--but I know it's got to come!" She would not lift her head when he slipped his free arm about her shoulders and drew her against him. When he reached out to take the package from her she held it away from him, but her voice, half muffled against his checkered coat, was anything but hard. "Let _you_ carry them?" she murmured. "Why--I wouldn't trust them to any other hands in the world but my own. You can't even see them again--not until I've finished them, and I wear them--for you." With head still bowed she walked before him to the open door. But there on the threshold she stopped and flashed up at him her whimsically provocating smile. "Tell me--why don't you tell me, Denny," she commanded imperiously, "that I'm prettier than all the others--even if I haven't the pretty clothes!" When the ridges to the east were tinged with the red of a rising sun, Denny Bolton was still sitting, head propped in his hands, at the table before the window, totally oblivious to the smoking lamp beside him, or to anything else save the square card which he had found lying there beneath the table after he had taken her back across the valley to John Anderson's once-white cottage. He rose and extinguished the smoking wick as the first light of day began to creep through the room. "---- requests the pleasure of Miss Dryad Anderson's company," he repeated aloud. And then, as he turned to the open door and the work that was waiting for him, in a voice that even he himself had never before heard pass his lips: "And she could have gone--she could have, and she didn't--just because----" His grave voice drifted off into silence. As if it were a perishably precious thing, he slipped the square card within its envelope and buttoned the whole within his coat. CHAPTER V As far back as he could remember Denny could not recall a single day when Old Jerry had swung up the long hill road that led to his lonesome farmhouse on the ridge at a pace any faster than a crawling walk. Nor could he recollect, either, a single instance when he had chanced to arrive at that last stop upon the route much before dark.