Dad burn me, if I wouldn’t.  He’d better take one o’ them new fangled women in th’ city, where he’s gone to, an’ not come back here for one o’ our girls.  I don’t believe Sammy’d care much, nohow, ba thundas!  What!” The official tossed the letter into a pigeon hole beside its neglected mate, with a gesture that fully expressed the opinion of the entire community, regarding Mr. Stewart and his intentions toward Miss Lane.

Sammy got the letters the next day, and read them over and over, as she rode slowly through the sweet smelling woods.  The last one told her that Ollie was coming home on a visit.  “Thursday, that’s the day after to-morrow,” she said aloud.  Then she read the letter again.

It was a very different letter from those Ollie had written when first he left the woods.  Most of all it was different in that indefinable something by which a man reveals his place in life in the letters he writes, no less than in the words he speaks, or the clothing he wears.  As Sammy rode slowly through the pinery and down the narrow Fall Creek valley, she was thinking of these things, thinking of these things seriously.

The girl had been in a way conscious of the gradual change in Ollie’s life, as it had been revealed in his letters, but she had failed to connect the change with her lover.  The world into which young Stewart had gone, and by which he was being formed, was so foreign to the only world known to Sammy, that, while she realized in a dim way that he was undergoing a transformation, she still saw him in her mind as the backwoods boy.  With the announcement of his return, and the thought that she would soon meet him face to face, it burst upon her suddenly that her lover was a stranger.  The man who wrote this letter was not the man whom she had promised to marry.  Who was he?

Passing the mill and the blacksmith shop, the brown pony with his absorbed rider began to climb the steep road to the Matthews place.  Half way up the hill, the little horse, stepping on a loose stone, stumbled, catching himself quickly.

As a flash of lightning on a black night reveals well known landmarks and familiar objects, this incident brought back to Sammy the evening when, with Ollie and Young Matt, she had climbed the same way; when her horse had stumbled and her face had come close to the face of the big fellow whose hand was on the pony’s neck.  The whole scene came before her with a vividness that was startling; every word, every look, every gesture of the two young men, her own thoughts and words, the objects along the road, the very motion of her horse; she seemed to be actually living again those moments of the past.  But more than this, she seemed not only to live again the incidents of that evening, but in some strange way to possess the faculty of analyzing and passing judgment upon her own thoughts and words.

Great changes had come to Sammy, too, since that night when her lover had said good-by.  And now, in her deeper life, the young woman felt a curious sense of shame, as she saw how trivial were the things that had influenced her to become Ollie’s promised wife.  She blushed, as she recalled the motives that had sent her to the shepherd with the request that he teach her to be a fine lady.