She shook her head despondently. "I cayn't nev' tell you that, Tom-Jeff." "I'd like to know why you can't." "Because he'd shore kill me then." "Then I'll find out some other way." "What differ' does it make to you?" she asked; and again the dark eyes searched him till he was fain to look away from her. "I reckon it doesn't make any difference, if you don't want it to. But one time you were willing enough to tell me your troubles, and--" "And I'll nev' do it nare 'nother time; never, _never_. And let me tell you somethin' else, Tom-Jeff Gordon: if you know what's good for you, don't you nev' come anigh me again. One time we usen to be a boy and a girl together; you're nothin' but a boy yet, but I--oh, God, Tom-Jeff--I'm a woman!" And with that saying she snatched her bucket and was gone before he could find a word wherewith to match it. XVII ABSALOM, MY SON! Three days after the episode at the barrel-spring, Tom went afield again, this time to gather plunging courage for the confession to his mother--a thing which, after so many postponements, could be put off no longer. It was more instinct than purpose that led him to avoid the mountain. Thinking only of the crying need for solitude, he crossed the pike and the creek and rambled aimlessly for an hour or more over that farther hill ground beyond the country-house colony where he had once tried to break the Dabney spirit in a weary, bedraggled little girl with colorless lips and saucer-like eyes. When he recrossed the stream, at a point some distance above the boy-time perch pools, the serving foot-log chanced to be that used by the Little Zoar folk coming from beyond the boundary hills. Following the windings of the path he presently came out in the rear of the weather-beaten, wooden-shuttered church standing, blind-eyed and silent, in week-day desertion in the midst of its groving of pines. The spot was rife with memories, and Tom passed around the building to the front, treading softly as on hallowed ground. Whatever the future might hold for him, there would always be heart-stirring recollections to cluster about this frail old building sheltered by the whispering pines. How many times he had sat on the steps in the door-opening days of boyhood, looking out across the dusty pike and up to the opposing steeps of Lebanon lifting the eastward horizon half-way to the zenith! Leg-weariness, and a sudden desire to live over again thus much of the past turning him aside, he went to sit on the highest of the three steps, with the brooding silence for company and the uplifted landscape to revamp the boyhood memories.