He realized, as many another man has done, that in extreme crises, involving risk, quondam friendships are but as broken reeds, and he was leaning stoutly only upon his own fealty to his own best interests, as he jogged along on his old brown mare, with her frisky colt at her heels, down the red clay roads of the cove, and through rugged mountain passes into still other coves, on his way to Colbury, the county town. His heart burned hot within him against Jane Ann Sims when he recalled her advice to the man to say nothing to him, the head of the house and the father of the girl! She’d settle _him_! Would she, indeed? And he relished with a grim zest, as a sort of reparation, the fright she had suffered at the bare possibility of an elopement. Then this recollection, reacting on his own heart, set it all a-plunging, as he toiled on wearily in the hot sun, lest this disaster might chance during his absence, and he found himself leaning appealingly, forlornly, on the honor of the very man whom his mission was to ruin if he could. It was he who had refused to dispense with the father’s consent could it be obtained, and the perfidious Jane Ann Sims had counseled otherwise; he who had taken note of hospitality and courtesy,--much of which, in truth, had been mere seeming. More than once it almost gave Sims pause to reflect to whom he was indebted for any show of consideration. He had, however, but one daughter. This plea, he felt, might serve to excuse unfounded suspicion, and make righteous a breach of hospitality, and even justify cruelty. “One darter!” he often said to himself as he went along, all unaware that if he had had six his cares, his solicitude, his paternal affection, would have been meted out six-fold, so elastic is the heart to the strain upon its resources. For this cause, despite his softened judgment toward the juggler, he did not flinch when he reached Colbury, and made his way across the “Square,” where every eye seemed to his anxious consciousness fixed upon him, as if attributing to him some nefarious designs on the liberty of an innocent man. But in reality the town folks of Colbury were far too sophisticated in their own esteem to accord the slightest note to an old codger from the mountains,--a region as remote to the majority, save now and then for a glimpse of an awe-stricken visitor from the backwoods, as the mythical island of Atlantis. For such explorations into the world at large as the ambitious citizens of Colbury adventured led them not into the scorned rural wilds comprehensively known to them as “’way up in the Cove.”