her shoulders, and she wondered whether she could ever look like
the dainty creature that just now was the model she so
passionately wanted to be like. Then she blew out the lamp and sat
a while by the window, looking down through the rhododendrons, at
the shining water and at the old water-wheel sleepily at rest in
the moonlight. She knelt down then at her bedside to say her
prayers--as her dead sister had taught her to do--and she asked
God to bless Jack--wondering as she prayed that she had heard
nobody else call him Jack--and then she lay down with her breast
heaving. She had told him she would never do that again, but she
couldn't help it now--the tears came and from happiness she cried
herself softly to sleep.




XIII


Hale rode that night under a brilliant moon to the worm of a
railroad that had been creeping for many years toward the Gap. The
head of it was just protruding from the Natural Tunnel twenty
miles away. There he sent his horse back, slept in a shanty till
morning, and then the train crawled through a towering bench of
rock. The mouth of it on the other side opened into a mighty
amphitheatre with solid rock walls shooting vertically hundreds of
feet upward. Vertically, he thought--with the back of his head
between his shoulders as he looked up--they were more than
vertical--they were actually concave. The Almighty had not only
stored riches immeasurable in the hills behind him--He had driven