So laid at rest were her fears, so full of other things the busy days, that when, one afternoon, not ten days before they were leaving, he came up the hill soon after dinner, banjo in hand, saying he had a new ballad to teach her if she wished to learn it, she went unhesitatingly to the spur-top with him, and sat on a bench beneath a spreading beech. He took his seat on the ground before her and began the plaintive ballad. It was a long-drawn-out, doleful, but beautiful one about misplaced love, with the oft-recurring refrain:-- If I had known, before I courted, That love was such a sorrowful thing, I'd have locked my heart in a box of golden, And pinned it down with a silver pin. As he sang, he lifted dark, mournful eyes to hers; and toward the end, she was amazed to see them brimmed with tears. Tears in Fult's eyes seemed to her the strangest sight she had ever looked upon. "You see hit hain't no use," he said, very gently, dashing away the tears before they could overflow. "To pleasure you, I try not to show what I feel; but hit hurts, hurts me, all the time." Isabel said, as lightly as she could, "You just imagine it hurts; you'll forget before I'm out of sight." "I'll never forget," declared Fult, in a low voice; "hit wouldn't be possible. Allus I'll keep you in my mind, and carry your picture in my heart; long as I live hit'll be the same, even though I don't never see you or hear of you ever again. You are going far away from me, where I won't never hear your sweet voice no more, or look upon your face with delight. But even if the old salt sea was to roll forever between us, my feelings for you would still be the same; I couldn't never change." This new mood of his, sad, earnest, gentle, undemanding, worked upon Isabel's sympathies; the thought of being hopelessly loved by such a beautiful being smote her romantic soul. "I wish I had never come," she said, "if my coming meant even a little suffering for you." "Oh, no," he replied, with a martyr's look, "I'd rather suffer torments as not to have loved you; the pain of hit is better than any other pleasure. And as long as you stay where I can get a look at you now and then, I can stand hit all right; but now you are fixing to go away where I won't never, never see you no more, hit appears to be more than I can face." Then, suddenly, as a distressed child might have done, he bowed his head on his hands, and his body shook with sobs. It was a beautiful head, of noble shape, with glossy, blue-black hair. Isabel's heart was torn as she gazed upon his grief. For an instant she forgot everything but his suffering. "Don't take it this way," she begged, and there were tears now in her own eyes. "I never dreamed you cared really, and it distresses me to death." Fult made no reply save to give her a long look; then he sat, head bowed in hands, body shaken with slow sobs, for some minutes. At last, lifting mournful eyes to hers, he asked, gently, hopelessly:--