"Anne," he said fervently, "you asked me if I'd miss anything but the hills. I'll miss _you_--like--all hell--because I love you like that." They were on a mountain top, with no one to see them. They were almost children and inexperienced. They thought that they could lay down their plans and build their lives in accordance, with no deflection of time or circumstance. A few moments later they stood flushed with the intoxication of that miracle that makes other miracles pallid. The girl's breath came fast and her cheeks were pinkly flushed. The boy's heart hammered, and the leagues of outspread landscape seemed a reeling, whirling but ecstatically beautiful confusion. Their eyes held in a silent caress, and for them both all subsequent things were to be dated from that moment when he had impulsively taken her in his arms and she had returned his first kiss. CHAPTER XIX General Basil Prince sat in his law office one murky December morning of the year 1903. It was an office which bespoke the attorney of the older generation, and about it hung the air of an unadorned workship. If one compared it with the room in the same building where young Morgan Wallifarro worked at a flat-topped mahogany table, one found the difference between Spartan simplicity and sybarite elegance. But over one book case hung an ancient and battered cavalry sword, a relic of the days when the General had ridden with the "wizards of the saddle and the sabre." Just now he was, for the second time, reading a letter which seemed to hold for him a peculiar interest. * * * * * "Dear General," it ran: "Your invitation to come to Louisville and meet at your table that coterie of intimates of whom you have so often spoken is one that tempts me strongly--and yet I must decline. "You know that my name is not McCalloway--and you do not know what it is. I think I made myself clear on that subject when you waived the circumstance that I am a person living in hermitage, because my life has not escaped clouding. You generously accepted my unsupported statement that no actual guilt tarnishes the name which I no longer use--yet despite my eagerness to know those friends of yours, those gentlemen who appeal so strongly to my imagination and admiration, I could not, in justice to you or to myself, permit you to foist me on them under an assumed name. I have resolved upon retirement and must stand to my resolution. The discovery of my actual identity would be painful to me and social life might endanger that. "I'll not deny that in the loneliness here, particularly when the boy is absent, there are times when, for the dinner conversation of gentlemen and ladies, I would almost pawn my hope of salvation. There are other times, and many, when for the feel of a sabre hilt in my hand, for the command of a brigade, or even a regiment, I would almost offer my blade for hire--almost but not quite.