“Is THIS the little girl? Howdye, June,” he said, and June put her hand in the Hon. Sam's with a sudden trust in his voice. “I'm going to help take care of you, too,” said Mr. Budd, and June smiled at him with shy gratitude. How kind everybody was! “I'm much obleeged,” she said, and she and Mrs. Crane went on back with their bundles. June's hands so trembled when she found herself alone with her treasures that she could hardly unpack them. When she had folded and laid them away, she had to unfold them to look at them again. She hurried to bed that night merely that she might put on one of those wonderful night-gowns, and again she had to look all her treasures over. She was glad that she had brought the doll because HE had given it to her, but she said to herself “I'm a-gittin' too big now fer dolls!” and she put it away. Then she set the lamp on the mantel-piece so that she could see herself in her wonderful night-gown. She let her shining hair fall like molten gold around her shoulders, and she wondered whether she could ever look like the dainty creature that just now was the model she so passionately wanted to be like. Then she blew out the lamp and sat a while by the window, looking down through the rhododendrons, at the shining water and at the old water-wheel sleepily at rest in the moonlight. She knelt down then at her bedside to say her prayers--as her dead sister had taught her to do--and she asked God to bless Jack--wondering as she prayed that she had heard nobody else call him Jack--and then she lay down with her breast heaving. She had told him she would never do that again, but she couldn't help it now--the tears came and from happiness she cried herself softly to sleep. XIII Hale rode that night under a brilliant moon to the worm of a railroad that had been creeping for many years toward the Gap. The head of it was just protruding from the Natural Tunnel twenty miles away. There he sent his horse back, slept in a shanty till morning, and then the train crawled through a towering bench of rock. The mouth of it on the other side opened into a mighty amphitheatre with solid rock walls shooting vertically hundreds of feet upward. Vertically, he thought--with the back of his head between his shoulders as he looked up--they were more than vertical--they were actually concave. The Almighty had not only stored riches immeasurable in the hills behind him--He had driven this passage Himself to help puny man to reach them, and yet the wretched road was going toward them like a snail. On the fifth night, thereafter he was back there at the tunnel again from New York--with a grim mouth and a happy eye. He had brought success with him this time and there was no sleep for him that night. He had been delayed by a wreck, it was two o'clock in the morning, and not a horse was available; so he started those twenty miles afoot, and day was breaking when he looked down on the little valley shrouded in mist and just wakening from sleep.