And so the winter months passed until one morning a wood-thrush hidden in green depths sent up a song of spring to Gray’s ears in the hills, and in the Blue-grass a meadow-lark wheeling in the sun-light showered down the same song upon the heart of Jason Hawn.

Almost every Saturday Mavis would go down to stay till Monday with her grandfather Hawn.  Gray would drift down there to see her—­and always, while Mavis was helping her grandmother in the kitchen, Gray and old Jason would sit together on the porch.  Gray never tired of the old man’s shrewd humor, quaint philosophy, his hunting tales and stories of the feud, and old Jason liked Gray and trusted him more the more he saw of him.  And Gray was a little startled when it soon became evident that the old man took it for granted that in his intimacy with Mavis was one meaning and only one.

“I al’ays thought Mavis would marry Jason,” he said one night, “but, Lordy Mighty, I’m nigh on to eighty an’ I don’t know no more about gals than when I was eighteen.  A feller stands more chance with some of ’em stayin’ away, an’ agin if he stays away from some of ’em he don’t stand no chance at all.  An’ agin I rickollect that if I hadn’t ‘a’ got mad an’ left grandma in thar jist at one time an’ hadn’t ‘a’ come back jist at the right time another time, I’d ‘a’ lost her—­shore.  Looks like you’re cuttin’ Jason out mighty fast now—­but which kind of a gal Mavis in thar is, I don’t know no more’n if I’d never seed her.”

Gray flushed and said nothing, and a little later the old man went frankly on: 

“I’m gittin’ purty old now an’ I hain’t goin’ to last much longer, I reckon.  An’ I want you to know if you an’ Mavis hitch up fer a life-trot tergether I aim to divide this farm betwixt her an’ Jason, an’ you an’ Mavis can have the half up thar closest to the mines, so you can be close to yo’ work.”

The boy was saved any answer, for the old man expected and waited for none, so simple was the whole matter to him, but Gray, winding up the creek homeward in the moonlight that night, did some pretty serious thinking.  No such interpretation could have been put on the intimacy between him and Mavis at home, for there companionship, coquetry, sentiment, devotion even, were possible without serious parental concern.  Young people in the Blue-grass handled their own heart affairs, and so they did for that matter in the hills, but Gray could not realize that primitive conditions forbade attention without intention:  for life was simple, mating was early because life was so simple, and Nature’s way with humanity was as with her creatures of the fields and air except for the eye of God and the hand of the law.  A license, a few words from the circuit rider, a cleared hill-side, a one-room log cabin, a side of bacon, and a bag of meal—­and, from old Jason’s point of view, Gray and Mavis could enter the happy portals, create life for others, and go on hand in hand to the grave.  So that where complexity would block