"Now," he continued in a bitter desperation, "I've done what I said I'd never do. I've foresworn myself and told you that I love you. I might as well finish ... because I reckon I can guess what _you'll_ say presently. From the first day when you came here, I've been in love with you.... I've never seen the evening star rise up over the Kaintuck' Ridges that I haven't looked at it ... and thought of it as your own star.... I've never seen it either that I haven't said to myself, 'You might as well love that star,' and I've tried just to live from hour to hour when I was with you and not think about the day when you'd be gone away." Anne still stood with wide and questioning eyes, but no anger had come into them yet. Her voice shook a little as she asked, "Just why do you think of me that way, Boone? Why am I--so far--out of reach?" "Why!"--his question was an exclamation of amazement. "You've seen that cabin where I was born, haven't you? You know what your people call my people, don't you?... 'Poor white trash!' Between you and me there's a gorge two hundred years wide. Your folks are those that won the West, and mine are those that fell by the roadside and petered out and dry rotted." As he finished the speech which had been such a long one for him, he stood waiting. Into the unsteady voice with which she put her last question he had read the reserve of controlled anger--such as a just judge would seek to hold in abeyance until everything was said. So he braced himself and tried not to look at her--but he felt that the length of time she held him in that tight-drawn suspense was a shade cruel--unintentionally so, of course. The girl's face told him nothing either, at first, but slowly into the eyes came that scornful gleam that he had sometimes seen there when he sought to modify the risk involved in some reckless caprice of her own suggesting: a disdain for all things calculatedly cautious. At last she spoke. "You could say every one of those things about Lincoln," was her surprising pronunciamento. "You could say most of them about Napoleon or any big man that won out on his own. When I brought you that little bust, I thought you'd like it. I thought you had that same kind of a spirit--and courage." "But, Anne--" "I didn't interrupt you," she reminded him. "My idea of a real man is one who doesn't talk timidly about gorges--whether they're two hundred years wide, as you call it, or not. Napoleon wouldn't have been let into a kitchen door at court--so he came in through the front way with a triumphal arch built over it. _He_ knocked down barriers, and got what he wanted." "Then--" his voice rang out suddenly--"then if I can ever get up to where you stand I won't be 'poor white trash' to you?" She shook her head and her eyes glowed with invincible spirit. "You'll be a man--that wasn't fainthearted," she told him honestly. "One that was brave enough to live his own life as I mean to live my own."