At her own gate the girl turned to look back, but Jason was striding across the fields.  She turned again on the slope of the hill but Jason was still striding on.  She watched him until he had disappeared, but he did not turn to look and her heart felt a little hurt.  She was very quiet that night, so quiet that she caught a concerned look in her mother’s eyes, and when she had gone to her room her mother came in and found her in a stream of moonlight at her window.  And when Mrs. Pendleton silently kissed her, she broke into tears.

“I’m lonely, mother,” she sobbed; “I’m so lonely.”

A week later Jason sat on the porch one night after supper and his mother came to the doorway.

“I forgot to tell ye, Jason, that Marjorie Pendleton rid over here the day you got here an’ axed if you’d come home.”

“I saw her down the pike that day,” said Jason, not showing the surprise he felt.  Steve Hawn, coming around the corner of the house, heard them both and on his face was a malicious grin.

“Down the pike,” he repeated.  “I seed ye both a-talkin’, up thar at the edge of the woods.  She looked back at ye twice, but you wouldn’t take no notice.  Now that Gray ain’t hyeh I reckon you mought—­”

The boy’s protest, hoarse and inarticulate, stopped Steve, who dropped his bantering tone and turned serious.

“Now looky here, Jason, yo’ uncle Arch has tol’ me about Gray and Mavis already up that in the mountains, an’ I see what’s comin’ down here fer you.  You an’ Gray ought to have more sense—­gittin’ into such trouble—­”

“Trouble!” cried the boy.

“Yes, I know,” Steve answered.  “Hit is funny fer me to be talkin’ about trouble.  I was born to it, as the circuit rider says, as the sparks fly upward.  That ain’t no hope fer me, but you—­”

The boy rose impatiently but curiously shaken by such words and so strange a tone from his step-father.  He was still shaken when he climbed to Mavis’s room and was looking out of her window, and that turned his thoughts to her and to Gray in the hills.  What was the trouble that Steve had already heard about Mavis and Gray, and what the trouble at which Steve had hinted—­for him?  Once before Steve had dropped a bit of news, also gathered from Arch Hawn, that during the truce in the mountains little Aaron Honeycutt had developed a wild passion for Mavis, but at that absurdity Jason had only laughed.  Still the customs of the Blue-grass and the hills were widely divergent, and if Gray, only out of loneliness, were much with Mavis, only one interpretation was possible to the Hawns and Honeycutts, just as only one interpretation had been possible for Steve with reference to Marjorie and himself, and Steve’s interpretation he contemptuously dismissed.  His grandfather might make trouble for Gray, or Gray and little Aaron might clash.  He would like to warn Gray, and yet even with that wish in his mind a little flame of jealousy was already