"Sweetie, sweetie, I can tell you what Mr. Newsome was trying to say
to you--it was about me. I--I am going to be his wife, and you and
the aunties are never, never going to leave the Briars. He has just
left here and--and, oh, I am so grateful to keep it--for you--and
them. I never thought of that--I never suspected such--a--door in our
stone wall." And Rose Mary's voice was firm and gentle, but her deep
eyes looked out over Harpeth Valley with the agony of all the ages in
their depths.

But in hoping to conceal her tragedy Rose Mary had not counted on the
light love throws across the dark places that confront the steps of
those of our blood-bond, and in an instant Uncle Tucker's torch of
comprehension flamed high with the passion of indignation. Slowly he
rose to his feet, and the stoop in his feeble old shoulders
straightened itself out so that he stood with the height of his young
manhood. His gentle eyes lost the mysticism that had come with his
years of sorrow and baffling toil, and a stern, dignified power shone
straight out over the young woman at his side. He raised his arm and
pointed with a hand that had ceased to tremble over the valley to
where Providence Road wound itself over Old Harpeth.

"Rose Mary," he said sternly in a quiet, decisive voice that rang with
the virility of his youth, "when the first of us Alloways came along
that wilderness trail a slip of an English girl walked by him when he
walked and rode the pillion behind him when he rode. She finished that
journey with bleeding feet in moccasins he had bought from an Indian
squaw. When they came on down into this Valley and found this spring
he halted wagons and teams and there on that hill she dropped down to
sleep, worn out with the journey. And while she was asleep he stuck a