He passed on into Dannie’s room. The child was still sleeping. He bent down and kissed the flushed cheek and the dimpled hand. A smile crept over the little face, and the baby stirred in his sleep. Then he went into his own room and threw together a few things to supply his immediate wants. When he went downstairs again, Aunt Martha was standing in the front door. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him good-by. She had known all his hopes, his ambitions, his sorrows, his faults. She did not side with him against his father, but she felt for him from the bottom of her heart. At the gateway he turned and threw back to her a kiss. She stood in the front door and saw his stalwart figure stride down the road through the morning mist, and lose itself in the shadows of the gap. The summer passed, and autumn brought tinted glory to Pickett’s Gap, and then winter came and covered the landscape with her snows; but Charlie Pickett did not come back. Years went by, and still he did not return, and finally his very name grew to be but a memory among those who had known him in his boyhood and his youth. CHAPTER II “Good-by, Gran’pap!” “Good-by, Dannie! Get to school in time; and don’t forget to look after the sheep.” “All right, Gran’pap! Don’t forget about the new suspenders.” “No, indeed I won’t!” “Good-by!” Abner Pickett drove away, and Dannie sat on the gate-post and watched him until a turn in the road, as it wound through the narrow cañon of Pickett’s Gap, shut him from sight. He was still a picturesque figure, this old man, as he faced the climbing sun and started on the ten-mile journey to town. Approaching fourscore years, he had lost little of his physical energy, and none of his mental vigor. He was still brusque and biting, exact to a hair’s-breadth, honest to the heart. He never spoke to any one of Charlie. The whole countryside knew that he had driven his son from his home; but, save Charlie and himself, no one ever knew the reason why. Abner Pickett would not talk about it, and Charlie did not come back. Not that the old man did not care. No one believed that. No one could believe it who saw him every day. Aunt Martha, than whom no one knew him better, detected the bitterness and the sorrow of the estrangement in his keen eyes, and heard it in the tone of his voice time and again, as he went about his accustomed tasks. But she knew that in the stubbornness of his nature he would suffer death before he would make the first sign, or accept the first proffer of reconciliation. His pride had been too deeply cut to be healed with the salve of apology.