"You could say every one of those things about Lincoln," was her surprising pronunciamento. "You could say most of them about Napoleon or any big man that won out on his own. When I brought you that little bust, I thought you'd like it. I thought you had that same kind of a spirit—and courage."
"But, Anne—"
"I didn't interrupt you," she reminded him. "My idea of a real man is one who doesn't talk timidly about gorges—whether they're two hundred years wide, as you call it, or not. Napoleon wouldn't have been let into a kitchen door at court—so he came in through the front way with a triumphal arch built over it. He knocked down barriers, and got what he wanted."
"Then—" his voice rang out suddenly—"then if I can ever get up to where you stand I won't be 'poor white trash' to you?"
She shook her head and her eyes glowed with invincible spirit. "You'll be a man—that wasn't fainthearted," she told him honestly. "One that was brave enough to live his own life as I mean to live my own."
"Anne," he said fervently, "you asked me if I'd miss anything but the hills. I'll miss you—like—all hell—because I love you like that."
They were on a mountain top, with no one to see them. They were almost children and inexperienced. They thought that they could lay down their plans and build their lives in accordance, with no deflection of time or circumstance. A few moments later they stood flushed with the intoxication of that miracle that makes other miracles pallid. The girl's breath came fast and her cheeks were pinkly flushed. The boy's heart hammered, and the leagues of outspread landscape seemed a reeling, whirling but ecstatically beautiful confusion. Their eyes held in a silent caress, and for them both all subsequent things were to be dated from that moment when he had impulsively taken her in his arms and she had returned his first kiss.
CHAPTER XIX
General Basil Prince sat in his law office one murky December morning of the year 1903. It was an office which bespoke the attorney of the older generation, and about it hung the air of an unadorned workship. If one compared it with the room in the same building where young Morgan Wallifarro worked at a flat-topped mahogany table, one found the difference between Spartan simplicity and sybarite elegance. But over one book case hung an ancient and battered cavalry sword, a relic of the days when the General had ridden with the "wizards of the saddle and the sabre."