He bowed low, a look of death on his face. She pressed the head of the sobbing child to her breast, and firmly held it there with her beautiful white hand. “Good-bye,” she said, with the dignity and calmness of an offended queen. “Good-bye--forever!” He turned and moved away. A few paces from her, before the trees had obscured her from his sight, he looked back and saw her with Lionel in her arms. Her exquisite face was pressed consolingly against the golden head. She was whispering to the child and rocking back and forth, as if he were a babe on her breast. CHAPTER XXV |ON his left, farther away from the town, and about a mile distant, stood a small mountain. Dark-red as to soil, bristling with sandstone bowlders, sparcely grown with pines and thorny locust-trees, and gashed by rain-washed gullies, it rose majestically against the cloud-flecked blue of infinite space beyond. Hardly knowing why he did so, Galt turned his face toward it and strode on, vaguely conscious that he was battling against the soul-calamity which had beset him as a dumb beast might fight for its physical life. Around the sloping base of the mountain lay old worn-out fields, now given over to the riotous possession of anything which would take root upon its soil. There was no path leading to the seldom visited elevation, but with his eyes constantly on the solitary finger of earth he climbed over the old rail-fence encompassing the land, and forged his way through the dense undergrowth, now ploughing his feet through a matting of heather and dewberry-vines, or plunging unexpectedly into some weed-hidden spring or fresh-water stream. Between him and the mountain ran a creek, and he suddenly found himself at a spot on the banks of it, where, as a boy, home on his vacations, he used to fish. But it had changed, he told himself, as everything else had changed--he was a man now, but _such_ a man! Crossing the creek on a foot-log formed from the fallen corpse of a giant oak he had once known, he walked onward. The land was now sloping sharply upward, and his way was less impeded. The air was becoming more rarefied, the view on either side and behind him was unfolding more rapidly in the hazy distance. The sun, which had been beating on him mercilessly, was now behind a drifting cloud, and the cool breezes of a higher altitude fanned his flushed face.