Whenever he went home from the university he saw Happy, and in the tacit fashion of simple souls their neighbourhood fell to speaking of "Boone and Happy," as though the linking of their names was natural and logical, and in local gossip it was almost as though they were betrothed. Happy had other suitors, more than a few of them indeed, drawn to the Spradling house by her beauty. Along those neighbourhood creeks, from the trickles where they "headed up" to the mouths where they emptied, there were few girls who could hope to compete with her loveliness of sloe-eyes, dusky hair and slender grace of body. But the old wives shook their heads, saying, "Happy Spradling wouldn't hurt a fly--but jest ther same she's breakin' hearts right an' left because she's mortgaged ter Boone Wellver--an' she's jest a'waitin' fer him." Old Cyrus already looked on him as a son--and Boone spoke as little of Anne Masters as he would have spoken of the things sealed in Masonic secrecy. Happy's school was one which arranged its terms and vacations in accordance with local exigencies. Crop planting and gathering had the right of way over text-books, and so it happened that when Anne was at Marlin Town, Happy was usually at school--and their ways did not cross. Yet each summer, too, as a man may go from the provinces to court and yet not delude himself with the hallucination that he is a courtier, Boone went over to Marlin Town. For every summer Anne Masters came for a few weeks to visit the father, who held his position there, remote from the things that, to his thinking, made up the values of life. During these periods Boone found life a strange and paradoxical pattern, woven of a web of ecstasy and a woof of torture. Since that night when he had dragged suddenly at his bridle curb and had told himself, "I might as well fall in love with a star up there in heaven," he had never departed from his resolute conviction that it would be sheer insanity for him to entertain any thought of Anne, save that of the willing and faithful slave who would joyously have laid his life down for her. She dominated his world of boyhood dreams, and since he was not deaf to the talk about himself and "Cyrus Spradling's gal," he wondered if he ought not to tell Happy the whole truth. But after long reflection he shook his head. "It would only hurt Happy, like telling her about dreams that come at night--of some sort of heaven where I don't see her, herself." And so he did not tell her. * * * * *