“And I’ve lost every honest dream of all my life because of that same woman,” he spoke after a time. “She herself tried to tell me, and I wouldn’t believe her. Well, you’ve made it easier. “Not that it wasn’t over anyhow,” he added, with not the slightest trace of self-pride in his words. “Ma’am, let me tell you something—do you see that college house of ours up on the hill? Well, under the cornerstone of that building there are two things, and I put them both there myself. One is my copy of old John Calvin’s Institutes, and the other is a picture of Polly Pendleton. That’s a right odd combination, isn’t it, to go under the cornerstone of a college? Well, they’re both there. “So now you know. As for me, I’ve got to finish my education before I’m big enough and good enough to teach or preach up there. It was you—not that woman—made me feel that. It was _you_ that taught me how big and grand and sweet the world is, how much there is to learn, how much there is to do. It was _you_ who have shown me how far I have to go. I reckon it’ll be over hot plowshares, Ma’am. I’ve got my ordeal yet ahead. May justice and not mercy be mine in my ordeal. “You’ve made it easier,” he added after a time, “a heap easier. It’s only what the girl herself was trying to tell me—but I couldn’t believe it. Another man’s? No—I don’t share a woman with any other man on earth. What’s mine is mine. What’s his may be his. Let him rest up there on the hill. She’s dead, too, I reckon, now. But you see, I didn’t know. I’m glad you told me, Ma’am.” “_Don’t_ call me ‘_Ma’am_’!” exclaimed Marcia Haddon suddenly. “I hate that word!” Without any explanation, she rose and left him. She had seen the unveiling of a stark human life, and had begun to measure back her own life, her husband’s, with this whose story she now had heard. Hot plowshares? Why, yes, if need be. But that was his ordeal, and one that he had earned. Were men indeed all alike? CHAPTER XXIII GRANNY WILLIAM’S NARRATIONS DAVID JOSLIN did not come to renew his invitation to Marcia Haddon to ride into the mountains. She saw him no more. Nor did she herself even yet keep her oft-renewed promise to depart at once for the North. Moody and silent, aloof and unhappy, this passed from one resolve to another until one day Granny Williams, by chance, offered a means for carrying out her own self-formed plan of a visit deeper into the hills. “I sartinly would enj’y it, child, fer to go back in thar a ways with ye,” said Granny. “Three or four of my boys lives up in Redbird, an’ I hain’t been in thar fer a long time. We could ride up in one day an’ stay a month, fer as that, if we wanted.” “Aren’t you afraid to go?” asked Marcia Haddon, hesitating, knowing that the old lady would never see her eightieth birthday again.