Sammy, too, had entered a new world.  Step by step, as the young man had advanced in his schooling, and, dropping the habits and customs of the backwoods, had conformed in his outward life to his new environment, the girl had advanced in her education under the careful hand of the old shepherd.  Ignorant still of the false standards and the petty ambitions that are so large a part of the complex world, into which he had gone, she had been introduced to a world where the life itself is the only thing worth while.  She had seen nothing of the glittering tinsel of that cheap culture that is death to all true refinement, But in the daily companionship of her gentle teacher, she had lived in touch with true aristocracy, the aristocracy of heart and spirit.

Young Matt and Jim had thought that, in Sammy’s education, the bond between the girl and her lover would be strengthened.  They had thought to see her growing farther and farther from the life of the hills; the life to which they felt that they must always belong.  But that was because Young Matt and Jim did not know the kind of education the girl was getting.

So Ollie had come back to his old home to measure things by his new standard; and he had come back, too, to be measured according to the old, old standard.  If the man’s eyes were dimmed by the flash and sparkle that play upon the surface of life, the woman’s vision was strong and clear to look into the still depths.

Later in the day, as they walked together up the Old Trail to Sammy’s Lookout, the girl tried to show him some of the things that had been revealed to her in the past months.  But the young fellow could not follow where she led, and answered her always with some flippant remark, or with the superficial philosophy of his kind.

When he tried to turn the talk to their future, she skillfully defeated his purpose, or was silent; and when he would claim a lover’s privileges, she held him off.  Upon his demanding a reason for her coldness, she answered, “Don’t you see that everything is different now?  We must learn to know each other over again.”

“But you are my promised wife.”

“I promised to be the wife of a backwoodsman,” she answered.  “I cannot keep that promise, for that man is dead.  You are a man of the city, and I am scarcely acquainted with you.”

Young Stewart found himself not a little puzzled by the situation.  He had come home expecting to meet a girl beautiful in face and form, but with the mind of a child to wonder at the things he would tell her.  He had found, instead, a thoughtful young woman trained to look for and recognize truth and beauty.  Sammy was always his physical superior.  She was now his intellectual superior as well.  The change that had come to her was not a change by environment of the things that lay upon the surface, but it was a change in the deeper things of life—­in the purpose and understanding of life itself.  Like many of his kind, Ollie could not distinguish between these things.