But all the time when she was coming over from the Gap, the way had bristled with accusing memories of Hale--even from the chattering creeks, the turns in the road, the sun-dappled bushes and trees and flowers; and when she passed the big Pine that rose with such friendly solemnity above her, the pang of it all hurt her heart and kept on hurting her. When she walked in the garden, the flowers seemed not to have the same spirit of gladness. It had been a dry season and they drooped for that reason, but the melancholy of them had a sympathetic human quality that depressed her. If she saw a bass shoot arrow-like into deep water, if she heard a bird or saw a tree or a flower whose name she had to recall, she thought of Hale. Do what she would, she could not escape the ghost that stalked at her side everywhere, so like a human presence that she felt sometimes a strange desire to turn and speak to it. And in her room that presence was all-pervasive. The piano, the furniture, the bits of bric-a-brac, the pictures and books--all were eloquent with his thought of her--and every night before she turned out her light she could not help lifting her eyes to her once-favourite picture--even that Hale had remembered--the lovers clasped in each other's arms--“At Last Alone”--only to see it now as a mocking symbol of his beaten hopes. She had written to thank him for it all, and not yet had he answered her letter. He had said that he was coming over to Lonesome Cove and he had not come--why should he, on her account? Between them all was over--why should he? The question was absurd in her mind, and yet the fact that she had expected him, that she so WANTED him, was so illogical and incongruous and vividly true that it raised her to a sitting posture on the log, and she ran her fingers over her forehead and down her dazed face until her chin was in the hollow of her hand, and her startled eyes were fixed unwaveringly on the running water and yet not seeing it at all. A call--her step-mother's cry--rang up the ravine and she did not hear it. She did not even hear Bub coming through the underbrush a few minutes later, and when he half angrily shouted her name at the end of the vista, down-stream, whence he could see her, she lifted her head from a dream so deep that in it all her senses had for the moment been wholly lost. “Come on,” he shouted. She had forgotten--there was a “bean-stringing” at the house that day--and she slipped slowly off the log and went down the path, gathering herself together as she went, and making no answer to the indignant Bub who turned and stalked ahead of her back to the house. At the barnyard gate her father stopped her--he looked worried. “Jack Hale's jus' been over hyeh.” June caught her breath sharply. “Has he gone?” The old man was watching her and she felt it.