How could he guess that the quiet figure sitting in the low chair was suffering inexpressible pain, or that the eyes that looked out through half-closed lids seemed to see a world of rocking hills, black under clouds of an unrelieved hopelessness?
One who has come braced for an ordeal and finds that he has reared for himself a fictitious trouble, can realize in the moment of reaction only the vast elation of relief.
Had her acting been less perfect, he might have caught a shadowing forth of the truth—but, as it was, he only felt that shackles had been knocked from him, and that he stood a free man.
So he made a clean breast of how Anne had become his ideal; how he had fought that discovery as an absurdly impossible love, and how for that reason he had never before spoken of his feelings. But he did not, of course, intimate that it had been Anne herself who had finally given him a right to hope.
Happy listened in sympathetic silence, and when he was through she said, still softly:
"Boone, I reckon you've got a right hopeful life-span stretching out ahead of you—but are you sure you aren't fixing to break your heart, boy? Don't those folks down there—hold themselves mighty high? Don't they—sort of—look down on us mountain people?"
It was a fair question, yet one which he could not answer without betraying Anne's stout assertion of reciprocated feeling. He could only nod his head and declare, "A feller must take his chances, I reckon."
From the dark forests the whippoorwills called in those plaintive notes that reach the heart. Down by the creek the frogs boomed out, and platinum mists lay dreamily between their soft emphases of shadow. Boone was thinking of the girl whose star hung there in the sky. His heart was singing in elation, "She loves me and, thank God, Happy understands, too. My way lies clear!" He was not reflecting just then that princesses have often spoken as boldly as Anne had done, at sixteen, and have been forced to submit to other destinies at twenty. The girl was thinking—but that was her secret, and if she was bravely masking a tortured heart it should be left inviolate in its secrecy.
The young man in his abstraction did not mark how long the silence held, and when at last Happy rose he came out of his revery with a start.
"Boone, I'm mighty glad you felt that you could talk to me this way," she said. "I want to be a real friend. But I've been working hard today—and if it won't hurt your feelings, I wish you'd go home now. I'm dog-tired, and I'd like to go to bed."