"I'm glad you thought enough of them to come for them." "I couldn't come! Don't blame me!" "I understand! Only I might have helped you in your trouble. If a friend can't do that--may not do that! But it is too late now! You start for Virginia tomorrow?" "To-morrow." "And to-morrow Amy marries, I lose you both the same day! You are going straight to Mount Vernon?" "Straight to Mount Vernon." "Ah, to think that you will see Virginia so soon! I've been recalling a great deal about Virginia during these days when you would not come to see me. Now I've forgotten everything I meant to say!" They climbed the hill slowly. Two or three times she stopped and pressed her hand over her heart. She tried to hide the sound of her quivering breath and glanced up once to see whether he were observing. He was not. With his old habit of sending his thoughts on into the future, fighting its distant battles, feeling its far-off pain, he was less conscious of their parting than of the years during which he might not see her again. It is the woman who bursts the whole grape of sorrow against the irrepressible palate at such a moment; to a man like him the same grape distils a vintage of yearning that will brim the cup of memory many a time beside his lamp in the final years. He would have passed the house, supposing they were to go to the familiar seat in the garden; but a bench had been placed under a forest tree near the door and she led the way to this. The significance of the action was lost on him. "Yes," she continued, returning to a subject which furnished both an escape and a concealment of her feelings, "I have been revisiting my girlhood. You love Kentucky but I cannot make myself over."