"Later on I got to feelin' ashamed of myself, instead of my people," she replied. "I got to seein' that I was faultin' them for not having had the chance they were slavin' to give me." Boone bent attentively forward but he said nothing, and she went on. "You know as well as I do that, so far, there aren't many people here that have much use for changes, but there are some few. The ground that the school sets on was given by an old man that didn't have much else to give. I remember right well what he said in the letter he wrote. It's printed in their catalogue: 'I don't look after wealth for them, but I want all young-uns taught to live right. I have heart and cravin' that our people may grow better, and I deed my land to a school as long as the Constitution of the United States stands.' I reckon that's the right spirit, Boone." CHAPTER XXII Still the boy sat silent, with his chin in his hand, as sits the self-torturing figure of Rodin's bronze "Penseur"--the attitude of thought which kills peace. Boone understood that unless Happy found a man who shared with her that idea of keeping the torch lit in the midst of darkness, her life might benefit others, but for herself it would be a distressing failure. Happy had fancied him, that he realized, but he had thought of it as a phase through which she would pass with only such a scar as ephemeral affairs leave--one of quick healing. Now the fuller significance was clear. He knew that she faced a life which her very efforts at betterment would make unspeakably bleak, unless she found companionship. He saw that to him she looked for release from that wretched alternative--and he had come to tell her that, beyond a deep and sincere friendship, he had nothing to offer her. Such an announcement, though truthfulness requires it, is harder for being deferred. Words seemed elusive and unmanageable as he made his beginning. "I'm right glad that we are neighbours again, Happy," he told her. "I'm not much to brag on--but I set a value on the same things you do--and I reckon that means a good deal to--" He paused a moment, and added clumsily, "to friendships." Perhaps it was the word itself, or perhaps, and that is likelier, it was the light and unconscious stress with which Boone spoke it that told her without fuller explanation what he had come to confess. Two syllables brought her face to face with revelation, and all else he might say would be only redundancy. Already she had feared it at times when she lay wakeful in her bed. From that day when he had called her "Rebekkah at the Well," she had been in love with him. She had not awakened to any hot ambition until she had been fired with the incentive of paralleling his own educational course. Now if he were not to be in her life she had only developed herself out of her natural setting into a doom of miserable discontent.