It must not be thought that Wayne Craighill was tamely submissive to this new order of life. His arms and back ached for the first week, but he profited by his wood-cutting in the Virginia hills where his palms had been well toughened by the axe. The little room in which he slept was without a single comfort that he had known; he had been fastidious at table, and only the honest appetite created by his day’s work made possible the food set before him. He was possessed by a righteous feeling that he was punishing his body for all its misdeeds; his spirit, too, was subjected to hourly humiliations. He had been cursed as a fool by a dull “boss,” but had swallowed the cursing meekly. At supper one night his neighbour produced a bottle of whiskey and passed it down the line. It was vile stuff, but the odour of it struck home. Wayne rose abruptly and almost ran from the room. And all this time he heard nothing of Jean, though he had seen the house where she had lived--a little cottage of one story, with a flower garden about it, now sadly gone to weeds. It had last been opened, he learned, when Andrew Gregory was buried from it. He passed it daily, picturing her as she had lived there and wondering if the place would ever know her again. As his muscles hardened the day’s work worried him less, and he fell into the habit of taking long walks at night to exhaust his surplus energy. The goal of these was usually Golden Bridge, a point about a mile from town. The bridge--golden in nothing but its name--was a covered wooden structure of a picturesque type happily preserved in this region. He used to climb out on the stone pier at one end of it and sit there, hearing the song of the Susquehanna amid a blur of frog choruses and chants of insects. And these times were sacred to thoughts of Jean, for this was her country, these her hills, with their filmy scarfs of summer cloud thrown over their shoulders, and this her river, that had known all the years of her life. And there one night she came, as though in answer to his longing. He sat huddled on the pier, clasping his knees and smoking, when he heard someone crossing the bridge behind him. He had rarely been disturbed by pedestrians, and this had endeared the place to him. He turned as a woman emerged from the covered way into the moonlight; and his heart knew her even before his eyes. “Jean!” He jumped down into the road and stood uncovered. She drew away, smothering a cry, for he was not the Wayne Craighill she had seen last in his sister’s house. Toil in the summer heat had trained him fine and his beard had aged him. They gazed at each other long, the moonlight flowing round them; then their hands met. “I might have known it would be here,” she said half to herself, then aloud: “I have known this place always. They call it Golden Bridge--we children played here, and I used to sit on the bank over there and try to draw the bridge.”