“How could I be knowin’ to it?” she asked, taking him seriously, or appearing to.  “I nev’ knowed school let out this time o’ year.”

“It’s let out for me, Nan,” he said meaningly.  “I came home—­for good—­nearly three weeks ago.  My mother has been sick.  Didn’t you hear of it?”

She shook her head gravely.

“I hain’t been as far as Paradise sence paw and me moved back from Pine Knob, two months ago.  I don’t hear nothin’ any more.”

In times long past, Tom, valley-born and of superior clay, used to be scornful of the mountain dialect.  Now, on Nan’s lips, it charmed him.  It was blessedly reminiscent of the care-free days of yore.

“Say, Nan; I hope you haven’t got to hurry home,” he interposed, when she stooped to lift the overflowing bucket.  “I want to talk to you—­to tell you something.”

She looked up quickly, and there were scrolls unreadable in the black eyes.

“Air you a man now, Tom-Jeff, or on’y a boy like you used to be?” she asked.

Tom squared his broad shoulders and laughed.

“I’m big enough to be in my own way a good deal of the time.  I believe I could muddy Sim Cantrell’s back for him now, at arm-holts.”

But there was still a question in the black eyes.

“Where’s your preacher’s coat, Tom-Jeff?  I was allowin’ you’d be wearin’ it nex’ time we met up.”

“I reckon there isn’t going to be any preacher’s coat for me, Nan; that’s one of the things I want to talk to you about.  Let’s go over yonder and sit down in the sun.”

The place he chose for her was a flat stone half embedded in the up-climbing slope beyond the great boulder.  She sat facing the path and the spring, listening, while Tom, stretched luxuriously on a bed of dry leaves at her feet, told her what had befallen; how he had been turned out of Beersheba, and what for; how, all the former things having passed away, he was torn and distracted in the struggle to find a footing in the new order.

In the midst of it he had a feeling that she was only dimly apprehending; that some of his keenest pains—­most of them, perhaps—­did not appeal to her.  But there was comfort in her bodily presence, in the listening ear.  It was a shifting of the burden in some sort, and there be times when the humblest pack animal may lighten a king’s load.

His fears touching her understanding, or her lack of it, were confirmed when he had reached a stopping-place.

“They-all up yonder in that school where you was at hain’t got much sense, it looks like to me,” was her comment.  “You’re a man growed now, Tom-Jeff, and if you want to play cards or drink whisky, what-all business is it o’ their’n?”

He smiled at her elemental point of view; laughed outright when the significance of it struck him fairly.  But it betokened allegiance of a kind to gladden the heart of the masculine tyrant, and he rolled the declaration of fealty as a sweet morsel under his tongue.