Then they both laughed, and Caleb Parish was divided between smile and tears—but Peter Doane glowered and sat rigid, thinking of freshly reared barriers that democracy should have levelled.
CHAPTER IV
A week later Dorothy led Kenneth Thornton and Peter Doane to a place where beside a huge boulder a "spring-branch" gushed into a natural basin of stone. The ferns grew thick there, and the moss lay deep and green, but over the spot, with branches spreading nobly and its head high-reared, stood an ancient walnut and in the narrow circle of open ground at its base grew a young tree perhaps three feet tall.
"I want to move that baby tree," said Dorothy, and now her voice became vibrant, "to a place where, when it has grown tall, it can stand as a monument over my mother's grave."
She paused, and the two young men offered no comment. Each was watching the glow in her eyes and feeling that, to her, this ceremony meant something more than the mere setting out of a random seedling.
"It will stand guard over our home," she went on, and her eyes took on an almost dreamy far-awayness. "It will be shade in summer and a reminder of coming spring in winter. It will look down on people as they live and die—and are born. At last," she concluded, "when I come to die myself, I want to be buried under it, too."
When the young walnut had been lifted clear and its roots packed with some of its own native earth Kenneth Thornton started away carrying it in advance while Dorothy and Peter followed.
But before they came to the open space young Doane stopped on the path and barred the girl's way. "Dorothy," he began, awkwardly, and with painful embarrassment, "I've got something thet must needs be said—an' I don't rightly know how to say it."