Of them all none took the blow harder than Jaqueline Telfair, commonly known as Jack. Jack was just twenty-one, and the fact that he was a full year younger than Miss Habersham, had lain like a blight over the whole course of his wooing. In any other part of the land he might have concealed his lack of years, for he was unusually tall and broad and strong, but he could not do so at his home in Alabama, where everybody had known everything about everybody for two hundred years and more. Still, Jack hoped against hope and refused to believe the news until he received it from Miss Habersham’s own lips. Miss Habersham, by the way, was not quite so composed as she tried to be when she told him. Jack was so big and fine and looked at her so straight and, altogether, was such a lovable boy that her heart throbbed most unaccountably and before she quite knew what she was doing she had leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. “Good-by, Jack, dear,” she said softly. Then, while Jack stood petrified, she turned and fled. She did not love Jack in the least and she did love Dick Ogilvie, but--Oh! well! Jack was a gentleman; he would understand. Jack did understand. For a few seconds he stood quite still; then he too walked away, white faced and silent. The next morning he went out to hunt; that is, he took a light shot-gun and tramped away into the half dozen square miles of tangled woodland that lay at the back of the Telfair barony along the Tallapoosa River. But as he left his dog and his negro body-servant, Cato, at home, he probably went to be alone rather than to kill. Spring was just merging into summer, and the sun spots were dancing in the perfumed air across the tops of the grasses. Great butterflies were flitting over the painted buttercups and ox-eyed daisies, skimming the shiny gossamers beneath which huge spiders lay in wait. From every bush came the twitter of nestlings or the wing flash of busy bird parents. Squirrels, red and gray, flattening themselves against the bark, peered round the trunks of great trees with bright, suspicious eyes. Molly cottontails crouched beneath the growing brambles. Round about lay the beautiful woodland, range after range of cobweb-sheeted glades splashed with yellow light. Crisp oaks and naked beeches, mingled with dark green hemlocks and burnished quivering pines, towered above bushes of sumach and dogwood, twined and intertwined with swift-growing dewberry vines. From somewhere on the right came the sound of water rippling over a pebbly bed.