“There is a love that forgets all else—­that forgets honor.  I forged a letter to the authorities and signed my father’s name to it.  It told them to send me back at once—­that my mother was ill.  I came back to these hills, but not home.  Far back in the woods here William Tuck had a hut.  He was a wood-cutter.  He lived alone.  He owed nothing to any man.  Many a time we had shot and fished together.  I came back to William.

“This lane doesn’t lead to Aunt Jed’s.  This land never belonged to her.  Here we used to meet, Jeanette and I. You see the mass of fox-grape over yonder?  In that day the wall hadn’t tumbled.  It stood straight and firm.  The fox-grape sprang from it and climbed in a great veil over the young trees.  Behind that wall, in the cool dusk of the grapevine, we used to sit and laugh inside when a rare buggy or a wagon went by.”

Leighton drew a long breath.

“I used to lie with my head in Jeanette’s lap because it was the only way I could see her eyes.  Her lashes were so long that when she raised them it was like the slow flutter of the wings of a butterfly at rest.  She did not raise them often.  She kept them down—­almost against the soft round of her cheek—­because—­because, she said, she could dream better that way.

“How shall I tell you about her hair?  I used to reach up and pull at it until it tumbled.  And then, because Jeanette’s hair never laughed except when it was the playmate of light, I used to drag her to her feet, across the wall, across the lane, down there to the flat rock just above the spring.

“There we would sit, side by side, and every once in a while look fearfully around, so public seemed that open space.  But all we ever saw for our pains was a squirrel or perhaps a woodchuck looking around fearfully, too.  Jeanette would sit with her hands braced behind her, her tumbled hair splashing down over her shoulders and down her back.  The setting sun would come skipping over the hills and play in her hair, and Jeanette’s hair would laugh—­laugh out loud.  And I—­I would bury my face in it, as you bury your face in flowers, and wonder at the unshed tears that smarted in my eyes.”

Leighton stopped to sigh.  It was a quivering sigh that made Lewis want to put out his hand and touch his father, but he was afraid to move.  Leighton went on.

“Look well about you, boy.  No wheel has jarred this silence for many a year—­not since I bought the land you see and closed the road.  Man seldom comes here now,—­only children in the fall of the year when the chestnuts are ripe.  Jeanette liked children.  She was never anything but a child herself.  Look well about you, I say, for these still woods and fields, with God’s free air blowing over them,—­they were your cradle, the cradle of your being.

“It was Jeanette that made me go back to college when college opened, but months later it was William that sent for me when Jeanette was too weak to stop him.  The term was almost over.  Through all the winter I had never mentioned Jeanette to the folks at home, hoping that my father would let me come home for the summer and wander these hills unwatched.  Now William wrote.  I couldn’t make out each individual word, but the sum of what he tried to tell flew to my heart.