So he sat down on a boulder where the shadow blotted him into the night, and when he had been there for a while he looked up in a fresh astonishment. Happy had not gone to bed. She was coming now across the stile, with movements like those of a sleep-walker. Outside on the road she stood for a while, pallid and wraith-like in the moonlight, looking in the direction she supposed he had taken, while her fingers plucked at her dress with distressed little gestures. Then with unsteady steps she went on to the edge of the highway and leaned against the boll of a tall poplar. He could see that her eyes were wide and her lips moving. Then she wheeled and threw her hands, with outspread fingers, against the cool bark above her head, leaning there as a child might lean on a mother's bosom, and the sobs that shook her slender body came to him across the short interval of distance. Boone went over to her with hurried strides, and when she felt his hands on her shoulders she wheeled. Then only did her brave disguise fail her, and she demanded almost angrily, forgetting her school-taught diction, "Why didn't ye go home like I told ye? Why does ye hev ter dog me this fashion, atter I'd done sent ye away?" "What's the matter, Happy?" he demanded; but he knew now, well enough, and he was too honest to dissimulate. "I didn't know, Happy," he pleaded. "I thought you meant it all." "I did mean hit all--I means thet I wants thet ye should be happy--only--" Her voice broke there as she added, "--only I've done always thought of myself as yore gal." She broke away from him with those words and fled back into the house, and most of that night Boone tramped the woods. On the morning after Happy had fled from him, under the spurring of her discovered secret, she had not been able with all her bravery of effort to hide from the family about the daybreak breakfast table the traces of a sleepless and tearful night. To Happy, this morning the murky room which was both kitchen and dining hall seemed the epitome of sordidness, with its newspaper-plastered walls and creaking puncheon floor. Yesterday each depressing detail had been alleviated by the thought that the future held a promise of release. Contemplating delivery, one can laugh gaily in a cell, but now the dungeon doors seemed to have been permanently closed and the key thrown away. "Happy's done been cryin'," shrilled one of the youngest of the brother and sister brood--for that was a typical mountain family to which, for years, each spring had brought its fresh item of humanity. As Cyrus pithily expressed it, "Thar hain't but only fo'teen of us settin' down ter eat when everybody's home." Old Cyrus put a stern quietus on the chorus of questioning elicited by the proclaiming of his daughter's grief. "Ef she's been cryin', thet's her own business," he announced. "I reckon she don't need ter name what hit's erbout every time she laughs or weeps."