CHAPTER XIII

At sunrise, in that Coniston hill-country, it is the western hills which
are red; and a distant hillock on the meadow farm which was soon to be
Eden's looked like the daintiest conical cake with pink icing as Cynthia
surveyed the familiar view the next morning. There was the mountain, the
pastures on the lower slopes all red, too, and higher up the dark masses
of bristling spruce and pine and hemlock mottled with white where the
snow-covered rocks showed through.

Sunrise in January is not very early, and sunrise at any season is not
early for Coniston. Cynthia sat at her window, and wondered whether that
beautiful landscape would any longer be hers. Her life had grown up on
it; but now her life had changed. Would the beauty be taken from it, too?
Almost hungrily she gazed at the scene. She might look upon it
again--many times, perhaps--but a conviction was strong in her that its
daily possession would now be only a memory.

Mr. Satterlee was as good as his word, for he was seated in the stage
when it drew up at the tannery house, ready to go to Brampton. And as
they drove away Cynthia took one last look at Jethro standing on the
porch. It seemed to her that it had been given her to feel all things,
and to know all things: to know, especially, this strange man, Jethro
Bass, as none other knew him, and to love him as none other loved him.
The last severe wrench was come, and she had left him standing there
alone in the cold, divining what was in his heart as though it were in
her own. How worthless was this mighty power which he had gained, how
hateful, when he could not bestow the smallest fragment of it upon one
whom he loved? Someone has described hell as disqualification in the face