"What has the moon to do with it?" she demanded.
But the vow of silence which Boone had taken with the grave solemnity of a Trappist monk was no longer a dependable bulwark. The dam had broken.
"Just this," he said soberly. "You're as far out of my reach as the moon itself. You say I seem afraid to tell you that I really like you. I am afraid. I'm so mortally afraid that I'd sworn I'd never tell you.... God knows that I couldn't start talking about that without saying the whole of it. I can't say I like you because I don't like you—I love you—I love you like—" The rapid flood of words broke off in abrupt silence. Then the boy raised his hands and let them fall again in a gesture of despair. "There isn't anything in the world to liken it to," he declared.
Anne's eyes had widened in astonishment. She said nothing at all, and Boone waited, steeling himself against the expected sentence of exile. Nothing less than banishment, he had always told himself, could be the penalty of such an outburst.
"Now," he continued in a bitter desperation, "I've done what I said I'd never do. I've foresworn myself and told you that I love you. I might as well finish ... because I reckon I can guess what you'll say presently. From the first day when you came here, I've been in love with you.... I've never seen the evening star rise up over the Kaintuck' Ridges that I haven't looked at it ... and thought of it as your own star.... I've never seen it either that I haven't said to myself, 'You might as well love that star,' and I've tried just to live from hour to hour when I was with you and not think about the day when you'd be gone away."
Anne still stood with wide and questioning eyes, but no anger had come into them yet. Her voice shook a little as she asked, "Just why do you think of me that way, Boone? Why am I—so far—out of reach?"
"Why!"—his question was an exclamation of amazement. "You've seen that cabin where I was born, haven't you? You know what your people call my people, don't you?... 'Poor white trash!' Between you and me there's a gorge two hundred years wide. Your folks are those that won the West, and mine are those that fell by the roadside and petered out and dry rotted."
As he finished the speech which had been such a long one for him, he stood waiting. Into the unsteady voice with which she put her last question he had read the reserve of controlled anger—such as a just judge would seek to hold in abeyance until everything was said. So he braced himself and tried not to look at her—but he felt that the length of time she held him in that tight-drawn suspense was a shade cruel—unintentionally so, of course.
The girl's face told him nothing either, at first, but slowly into the eyes came that scornful gleam that he had sometimes seen there when he sought to modify the risk involved in some reckless caprice of her own suggesting: a disdain for all things calculatedly cautious.
At last she spoke.