What was she to him? The answer, now he had it, stirred to wilder tumult the feelings that had brought him turbulently breasting up the Ridge. He looked again towards "Post Offic," toylike below, and had no tender thought for it--bitter vexation instead, as of the captive who goes to fury at the chains that bind him. That he should submit to be thus chained, thus apron-stringed! That Dora should laugh! That she should know him idler! Goading thoughts--maddening thoughts, and he flung himself, bruising himself, against them as the captive against his prison walls. That she should laugh! It should not be! It was not to be endured! He threw up his head in determination's action, his hands clenched, his body braced, resolve upon his angry brow. Ha! Ha! Ha! drummed old friend wind--Ha! Ha! Ha! He gave a half cry and turned and strode away along the Ridge, taking the direction that led him from home, and exerting himself under new impulse of the desire to rebuke his body and haply ease his mind. CHAPTER III A FRIEND UNCHANGED--AND A FRIEND GROWN I An hour at that pace brought him above Great Letham, clustered below. He paused irresolutely. From among the roofs, as it were, a crawling train emerged. He watched it worm its way along the eastward vale, then abruptly turned his back upon it as upon a thing more fortunate than he--not bound down here, as he was bound. Brooding upon the landscape, he suddenly became aware of a thin wisp of smoke that pointed up like a grey finger from the valley beneath him. It mounted in a steady, wand-like line from the belt of trees that marked Fir-Tree Pool, and its site and its appearance braced him to an alert attention. It had signalled him before. Only one person he had ever known lit a fire down there: only one hand in his experience contrived a flame which gave quite that steady, grey finger. He remembered Japhra showing him how to get the heart of a fire concentrated in a compact centre; he remembered Ima laughing at the sprawling heap, burning in desultory patches, that had come of his first attempt at imitation. "If only it is Japhra!" he said aloud; and he struck down the Ridge-side for a straight line across country to where the smoke proposed that Japhra might be. More than a year had passed since last the van had visited the district. Even Stingo, met sometimes over at Mr. Hannaford's, could give him no better news of it than that Japhra had not taken the road with Maddox's these two seasons. The disturbed state of mind that now vexed Percival could be soothed in no other way, he suddenly felt, than by the restful atmosphere that Japhra always communicated to him. Japhra would not laugh at him. Japhra would understand how he felt. Japhra would advise in that quiet way of his that made one see things as altogether different from the appearance they seemed to present. If only it were Japhra! II It was Japhra!