Ardea had gone back to Carroll the Saturday before New Year’s, and there was no one to talk to.  But for that matter, he had cut himself out of her confidence by his assault on the Farleys.  Every morning for a week after the Christmas-day clash, Scipio came over with the compliments of “Mawsteh Majah,” Miss Euphrasia, and Miss Dabney, and kindly inquiries touching the progress of the invalid.  But after New Year’s, Tom remarked that there were only the Major and Miss Euphrasia to send compliments, and despair set in.  For out of his boyhood he had brought up undiminished the longing for sympathy, or rather for a burden-bearer on whom he might unload his troubles, and Ardea had begun to promise well.

It was on a crisp morning in the second week of January when the prolonged agony of suspense drove him to the mountain.  His mother was sitting up, and was rapidly recovering her strength.  His father had gone back to his work in the iron plant, and his uncle was preparing to return to his charge in South Tredegar.  With Uncle Silas and the nurse both gone, Tom knew that the evil hour must come speedily; and it was with some half-cowardly hope that his uncle would break the ice for him that he ran away on the crisp morning of happenings.

With no particular destination in view, it was only natural that his feet should find the familiar path leading up to the great boulder under the cedars.  He had not visited the rock of the spring since the summer day when he and Nan Bryerson had taken refuge from the shower in the hollow heart of it, nor had he seen Nan since their parting at the door of her father’s cabin under the cliff.  Rumor in Gordonia had it that Tike Bryerson had been hunted out by the revenue officers; and, for reasons which he would have found it difficult to declare in words, Tom had been shy about making inquiries.

For this cause an apparition could scarcely have startled him more than did the sight of Nan filling her bucket at the trickling barrel-spring under the cliff face of the great rock.  He came on her suddenly at the end of the long climb up the wooded slopes, at a moment when—­semi-tropical growth having had two full seasons in which to change the natural aspect of things—­he was half-bewildered with the unwonted look of the place.  But there was no doubt about it; it was Nan in the flesh, a little fuller in the figure, something less childish in the face, but with all the fascinating, wild-creature beauty of the child-time promise to dazzle the eye and breed riot in the brain of the boy-man.

When she stood up with a little cry of pleased surprise, the dark eyes lighting quick joy-fires, and the welcoming blush mounting swiftly to neck and cheek, Tom thought she was the most alluring thing he had ever looked on.  Yet the bottom stone in the wall of recrudescent admiration was the certainty that he had found a sympathetic ear.

“Did you know I was coming?  Were you waiting for me, Nan?” he bubbled, gazing into the great black eyes as eagerly as a freed dog plunges into the first pool that offers.