Sally and his uncle alone had his address. This letter, casting him out, must have been authorized by them, Brother Spencer acting merely as amanuensis. They, too, had repudiated him--and, if that were true, except for the graves of his parents the hills had no tie to hold him. "Sally, Sally!" he groaned, dropping his face on his crossed arms, while his shoulders heaved in an agony of heart-break, and his words came in the old crude syllables: "I 'lowed you'd believe in me ef hell froze!" He rose after that, and made a fierce gesture with his clenched fists. "All right," he said, bitterly, "I'm shet of the lot of ye. I'm done!" But it was easier to say the words of repudiation than to cut the ties that were knotted about his heart. Again, he saw Sally standing by the old stile in the starlight with sweet, loyal eyes lifted to his own, and again he heard her vow that, if he came back, she would be waiting. Now, that picture lay beyond a sea which he could not recross. Sally and his uncle had authorized his excommunication. There was, after all, in the entire world no faith which could stand unalterable, and in all the world no reward that could be a better thing than Dead-Sea fruit, without the love of that barefooted girl back there in the log cabin, whose sweet tongue could not fashion phrases except in illiteracy. He would have gambled his soul on her steadfastness without fear--and he bitterly told himself he would have lost. And yet--some voice sounded to him as he stood there alone in the studio with the arteries knotted on his temples and the blood running cold and bitter in his veins--and yet what right had he, the deserter, to demand faith? One hand went up and clasped his forehead--and the hand fell on the head that had been shorn because a foreign woman had asked it. What tradition had he kept inviolate? And, in his mood, that small matter of shortened hair meant as great and bitter surrender as it had meant to the Samson before him, whose mighty strength had gone out under the snipping of shears. What course was open to him now, except that of following the precedent of the other Samson, of pulling down the whole temple of his past? He was disowned, and could not return. He would go ahead with the other life, though at the moment he hated it. With a rankling soul, the mountaineer left New York. He wrote Sally a brief note, telling her that he was going to cross the ocean, but his hurt pride forbade his pleading for her confidence, or adding, "I love you." He plunged into the art life of the "other side of the Seine," and worked voraciously. He was trying to learn much--and to forget much.