love with Luke Manders, and now she was nineteen, the age of her father’s stipulation, and she was falling in love with him, or rather, she[85] had fallen in love with him this morning. Bold, beautiful, fearless and free, the golden lad of their golden legend; she was carrying out her father’s last and dearest wish, living and dying. “If there’s anything in this ‘hereafter’ stuff ... if I’m—anywhere—you’ll know I’m glad!”

[85]

Her eyes looked very blue in the sudden pallor of her golden-olive face with its halo of glowing hair. It was not like the books, then; she felt solemn, thankful, uplifted; very close to her father.

Again Luke Manders was breathing like a runner, and again his voice was strange, with another strangeness. There was about him now a warmth and a softness, but they were as implacable as the harshness had been, and as little to be denied. “Remember that first day? How I caught you by your hair and jerked you back?”

“Yes.” She was a little breathless. “You said—‘Hi, Sis, run duck your head in the Branch! Didn’t you know your hair was a-fire?’” She laughed, but he did not laugh with her. Instead, she felt herself swept into an embrace which was compounded of flame and steel, and heard the second of his strange new voices.

“I’ve never touched your hair since that day, have I? I’ve never touched you. Not because I didn’t want to. Not because I didn’t crave to, and hunger to, and thirst to, honing for you, every hour of the[86] day, every hour of the night!” He slipped back into the picturesqueness of his mountain diction; even his accent reverted. He might have been, in that moment, the boy who leaped into the shaft of setting sunlight with his feud rifle in his hands. “But I promised your father to wait, and I’ve waited. But you are nineteen, and I am superintendent of the Altonia Mill”—it was almost like a chant of triumph—“and I’ll wait no longer! I have been aiming for this, just as I’ve been aiming for the mill, ever since—” Fingers of steel under her chin, lifting it, forcing her face upward. “I’ll wait no longer!”

[86]

[87]

CHAPTER VIII Miss Ada Tenafee rejoices to have her protégée receive two callers in one afternoon, and Miss Nancy Carey sees Luke Manders again.

IT was with a sense of sanctuary, of what children call “King’s X,” that Glen gained the backyard of her home, Luke striding beside her, and found 

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