eyes looked shyly at him. Before he left he had tried in vain to get
her to the tent of an itinerant photographer. During his absence,
she had evidently gone of her own accord. The face was very
beautiful, and in it was an expression of questioning, modest pride. "Aren't you surprised? "it seemed to say-" and pleased? Only the face, with its delicate lines, and the throat and the shoulders were visible. She looked almost refined. And the note-it was badly spelled and written with great difficulty, but it touched him. She was lonely, she said, and she wanted him to come back. Lonely- that cry was in each line.

His response to this was an instant resolution to go back at once,
and, sensitive and pliant as his nature was, there was no hesitation
for him when his duty was clear and a decision once made. With
great care and perfect frankness he had traced the history of his
infatuation in a letter to his father, to be communicated when the
latter chose to his mother and sister. Now he was nearing the
mountains again.

XI

THE journey to the mountains was made with a heavy heart. In his
absence everything seemed to have suffered a change. Jellico had
never seemed so small, so coarse, so wretched as when he stepped
from the dusty train and saw it lying dwarfed and shapeless in the
afternoon sunlight. The State line bisects the straggling streets of
frame-houses. On the Kentucky side an extraordinary spasm of
morality had quieted into local option. Just across the way in
Tennessee was a row of saloons. It was "pay-day" for the miners,
and the worst element of all the mines was drifting in to spend the
following Sabbath in unchecked vice. Several rough, brawny
fellows were already staggering from Tennessee into Kentucky,
and around one saloon hung a crowd of slatternly negroes, men
and women. Heartsick with disgust, Clayton hurried into the lane
that wound through the valley. Were these hovels, he asked
himself in wonder, the cabins he once thought so poetic, so