“What’s the matter, Mavis?”

Still she looked, unquestioning, uncompromising, and turned without answer and went slowly on home while the boy sat his horse and looked after her until she climbed the porch of her cottage and, without once turning her head, disappeared within.  But Jason at his meeting with Marjorie broke his grim reticence in spite of himself.  She had come upon him at sunset under the snowy willows by the edge of the ice-locked pond.  He had let the floodgates down and she had been shaken and terrified by the torrent that rushed from him.  The girl shrank from his bitter denunciation of himself.  He had been a fool.  The mid-year examinations would be a tragedy for him, and he must go to the “kitchen” or leave college with pride broken and in just disgrace.  Fate had trapped him like a rat.  A grewsome oath had been put on him as a child and from it he could never escape.  He had been robbed of his birthright by his own mother and the people of the Blue-grass, and Marjorie’s people were now robbing his of their national birthrights as well.  The boy did not say her people, but she knew that was what he meant, and she looked so hurt that Jason spoke quickly his gratitude for all the kindness that had been shown him.  And when he started with his gratitude to her, his memories got the better of him and he stopped for a moment with hungry eyes, but seeing her consternation over what might be coming next, he had ended with a bitter smile at the further bitter proof she was giving him.

“But I understand—­now,” he said sternly to himself and sadly to her, and he turned away without seeing the quiver of her mouth and the starting of her tears.

Going to his mother’s that afternoon, Jason found Mavis standing by the fence, hardly less pale than the snow under her feet, and looking into the sunset.  She started when she heard the crunch of his feet, and from the look of her face he knew that she thought he might be some one else.

He saw that she had been crying, and as quickly she knew that the boy was in a like agony of mind.  There was only one swift look—­a mutual recognition of a mutual betrayal—­but no word passed then nor when they walked together back to the house, for race and relationship made no word possible.  Within the house Jason noticed his mother’s eyes fixed anxiously on him, and when Mavis was clearing up in the kitchen after supper, she subtly shifted her solicitude to the girl in order to draw some confession from her son.

“Mavis wants to go back to the mountains.”

The ruse worked, for Jason looked up quickly and then into the fire while the mother waited.

“Sometimes I want to go back myself,” he said wearily; “it’s gittin’ too much for me here.”

Martha Hawn looked at her husband stretched on the bed in a drunken sleep and began to cry softly.

“It’s al’ays been too much fer me,” she sobbed.  “I’ve al’ays wanted to go back.”