Boone had stood for a moment in the lighted door, and in that interval the shrewd old eyes of Cyrus Spradling had told him that the boy too had known sleeplessness and that the clear-chiselled features bore unaccustomed lines of misery. If they had both suffered equally, reasoned the rude philosopher, it augured a quarrel not wholly or guiltily one-sided. So a few minutes later he watched them walking away together toward the creek bed, where the voice of the water trickled and the moonlight lay in a dreamy lake of silver. "I reckon," he reassured himself, "they'll fix matters up ternight. Hit's a right happy moon for lovers ter mend th'ar quarrels by." "Happy," began Boone, with moisture-beaded temples, when they had reached a spot remote enough to assure their being undisturbed, "I reckon I don't need to tell you that I haven't slept much since I saw you. I haven't been able to do anything at all except--just think about it." "I've thought about it--a good deal--too," was her simple response, and Boone forced himself on, rowelling his lagging speech with a determined will power. "I see now--that I didn't act like a man. I ought to have told you long ago--that I--that my heart was just burning up--about Anne." "I reckon I ought to have guessed it.... I'd heard hints." "It seemed a slavish hard thing to write," he confessed heavily. "I tried it--more than once--but when I read it over it sounded so different from what I meant to say that--" There he paused, and even had she been inclined to visit upon him the maximum instead of the minimum of blame, there was no escaping his sincerity or the depth of his contrition. "That, until I saw you--night before last--I didn't have any true idea--how much you cared." "I didn't aim that you ever should--have any idea." "Happy," he rose and with the blood receding from his skin looked down at her, as she sat there in the moonlight, "Happy, it seems like I never knew you--really--until now." She was, in her quietly borne distress, an appealing picture, and the hands that lay in her lap had the unmoving stillness of wax--or death. It had to be said, so he went on. "I never realized before now how fine you are--or how much too good you are for me. I've come over here tonight to ask you to marry me--if it ain't too late." The girl flinched as if she had been struck. Not even for a moment did her eagerness betray her into the delusion that this proposal was anything other than a merciful effort to soothe a hurt for which he felt himself blamable. Just as she had meant to keep from him the extent of her heart's bruising, so he was seeking now to make amends at the cost of all his future happiness. Having blundered, he was tendering what payment lay in possibility. "No, Boone," she said firmly. "We'd both live in hell for always--unless we loved each other--so much that nothin' else counted."