" ‘Poor Pete,’ we said.  Was he in truth, David, poorer or richer than we?”

They laid the boy beside his mother under the pines on the hills; the pines that showed so dark against the sky when the sun was down behind the ridge.  And over his bed the wild vines lovingly wove a coverlid of softest green, while all his woodland friends gathered about his couch.  Forest and hill and flower and cloud sang the songs he loved.  All day the sunlight laid its wealth in bars of gold at his feet, and at night the moonlight things and the shadow things came out to play.

Summer and autumn slipped away; the winter passed; spring came, with all the wonder of the resurrection of flower and leaf and blade.  So peace and quiet came again into the shepherd’s life.  When no answer to his letter was received, and the doctor did not return as he had promised, the old man knew that the last link connecting him with the world was broken.

CHAPTER XLIV.

The trail on the sunlit hills.

When Young Matt first knew that Sammy had sent Ollie back to the city with no promise to follow, he took to the woods, and returned only after miles of tramping over the wildest, roughest part of the country.  The big fellow said no word, but on his face was a look that his father understood, and the old mountaineer felt his own blood move more quickly at the sight.

But when Sammy with her books was fully established in the Matthews home, and Young Matt seemed always, as the weeks went by, to find her reading things that he could not understand, he was made to realize more fully what her studies with the shepherd meant.  He came to feel that she had already crossed the threshold into that world where Mr. Howitt lived.  And, thinking that he himself could never enter, he grew lonely and afraid.

With the quickness that was so marked in her character, Sammy grasped the meaning of his trouble almost before Young Matt himself knew fully what it was.  Then the girl, with much care and tact, set about helping him to see the truths which the shepherd had revealed to her.

All through the summer and fall, when the day’s work was done, or on a Sunday afternoon, they were together, and gradually the woods and the hills, with all the wild life that is in them, began to have for the young man a new meaning; or, rather, he learned little by little to read the message that lay on the open pages; first a word here and there, then sentences, then paragraphs, and soon he was reading alone, as he tramped the hills for stray stock, or worked in the mountain field.  The idle days of winter and the long evenings were spent in reading aloud from the books that had come to mean most to her.

So she led him on slowly, along the way that her teacher had pointed out to her, but always as they went, he saw her going before, far ahead, and he knew that in the things that men call education, he could never hope to stand by her side.  But he was beginning to ask, are there not after all things that lie still deeper in life than even these?