It was not to be found in any of the valley haunts, these having been transformed by the country-house colony.  The old water-wheel below the dam hung motionless, being supplanted by the huge, modern, blowing-engines; and the black wash from the coal-mines had driven the perch from the pools and spoiled the swimming-holes in the creek.  In the farther forests of the rampart hills the chopper’s ax had been busy; and the blackberry patches in all the open spaces were sacked daily by chattering swarms of the work-people’s children, white and black.

On the third morning Tom turned his steps despairingly toward the slopes of the mountain.  He was at a pass when he would have given worlds to find one of the sacred places undesecrated.  And there remained now only the high altar under the cedars of Lebanon to be visited.

It comforted him not a little to find that he had the old-time, burning thirst when he came within earshot of the dripping spring under the great rock.  But when he would have knelt to drink from his palms like Gideon’s men, there was no pool in the rocky basin.  A barrel had been sunk in the sand-filled crevice, and a greedy pipe-line sucked up the water as fast as it trickled from the rock, to pass it on to one of the thirsty mechanisms in the iron plant a thousand feet below.

In its way this was the final straw, and Tom sat down beside the utilized spring with a lump in his throat.  Afterward, he slaked his thirst as he could at the trickle from the rock’s lip, and then set his face toward the higher steeps.  Major Dabney,—­not yet fully in tune with his new neighbors of the country-house colony,—­and his granddaughter were spending the summer at Crestcliffe Inn, the new hotel on top of the mountain, and Tom felt that Ardea would understand if he could find and tell her.  There are times when one must find a sympathetic ear, or be rent and torn by the pent-up things within.

In one sense the sympathy quest was a devitalizing failure.  When he reached the summit of the mountain, hot and tired and dusty, the mere sight of the great hotel, with its thronged verandas and its overpowering air of grandeur and exclusiveness, quenched all desires save that which prompted a hasty retreat.  The sectarian school paid as little attention to the social as to the athletic side of its youth; and Tom Gordon at fifteen past was as helpless conventionally as if he had never set foot outside of Paradise.

But at the retractive moment he ran plump into the Major, stalking grandly along the tile-paved walk and smoking a war-time cheroot of preposterous length.  The despot of Paradise, despot now only by courtesy of the triumphant genius of modernity, put on his eye-glasses and stared Thomas into respectful rigidity.

“Why, bless my soul!—­if it isn’t Captain Gordon’s boy!  Well, well, you young limb!  If you didn’t faveh youh good fatheh in eve’y line and lineament of youh face, I should neveh have known you—­you’ve grown so.  Shake hands, suh!”