In an hour she emerged freshened, immaculate from her crown of lovely hair to her smartly booted feet, and at once she went downstairs. She heard the man, whom she passed, stop at the head of them and turn to look down at her, and she saw necks craned within the hotel office when she passed the door. On the street not a man and hardly a woman failed to look at her with wonder and open admiration, for she was an apparition in that little town and it all pleased her so much that she became flushed and conscious and felt like a queen who, unknown, moved among her subjects and blessed them just with her gracious presence. For she was unknown even by several people whom she knew and that, too, pleased her—to have bloomed so quite beyond their ken. She was like a meteor coming back to dazzle the very world from which it had flown for a while into space. When she went into the dining-room for the midday dinner, there was a movement in almost every part of the room as though there were many there who were on the lookout for her entrance. The head waiter, a portly darky, lost his imperturbable majesty for a moment in surprise at the vision and then with a lordly yet obsequious wave of his hand, led her to a table over in a corner where no one was sitting. Four young men came in rather boisterously and made for her table. She lifted her calm eyes at them so haughtily that the one in front halted with sudden embarrassment and they all swerved to another table from which they stared at her surreptitiously. Perhaps she was mistaken for the comic-opera star whose brilliant picture she had seen on a bill board in front of the “opera house.” Well, she had the voice and she might have been and she might yet be—and if she were, this would be the distinction that would be shown her. And, still as it was she was greatly pleased.
At four o'clock she started for the hills. In half an hour she was dropping down a winding ravine along a rock-lashing stream with those hills so close to the car on either side that only now and then could she see the tops of them. Through the window the keen air came from the very lungs of them, freighted with the coolness of shadows, the scent of damp earth and the faint fragrance of wild flowers, and her soul leaped to meet them. The mountain sides were showered with pink and white laurel (she used to call it “ivy”) and the rhododendrons (she used to call them “laurel”) were just beginning to blossom—they were her old and fast friends—mountain, shadow, the wet earth and its pure breath, and tree, plant and flower; she had not forgotten them, and it was good to come back to them. Once she saw an overshot water-wheel on the bank of the rushing little stream and she thought of Uncle Billy; she smiled and the smile stopped short—she was going back to other things as well. The train had creaked by a log-cabin set in the hillside and then past another and another; and always there were two or three ragged children in the door and a haggard unkempt woman peering over their shoulders. How lonely those cabins looked and how desolate the life they suggested to her now—NOW! The first station she came to after the train had wound down the long ravine to the valley level again was crowded with mountaineers. There a wedding party got aboard with a great deal of laughter, chaffing and noise, and all three went on within and without the train while it was waiting. A sudden thought stunned her like a lightning stroke. They were HER people out there on the platform and inside the car ahead—those rough men in slouch hats, jeans and cowhide boots, their mouths stained with tobacco juice, their cheeks and eyes on fire with moonshine, and those women in poke-bonnets with their sad, worn, patient faces on which the sympathetic good cheer and joy of the moment sat so strangely. She noticed their rough shoes and their homespun gowns that made their figures all alike and shapeless, with a vivid awakening of early memories. She might have been one of those narrow-lived girls outside, or that bride within had it not been for Jack—Hale. She finished the name in her own mind and she was conscious that she had. Ah, well, that was a long time ago and she was nothing but a child and she had thrown herself at his head. Perhaps it was different with him now and if it was, she would give him the chance to withdraw from everything. It would be right and fair and then life was so full for her now. She was dependent on nobody—on nothing. A rainbow spanned the heaven above her and the other end of it was not in the hills. But one end was and to that end she was on her way. She was going to just such people as she had seen at the station. Her father and her kinsmen were just such men—her step-mother and kinswomen were just such women. Her home was little more than just such a cabin as the desolate ones that stirred her pity when she swept by them. She thought of how she felt when she had first gone to Lonesome Cove after a few months at the Gap, and she shuddered to think how she would feel now. She was getting restless by this time and aimlessly she got up and walked to the front of the car and back again to her seat, hardly noticing that the other occupants were staring at her with some wonder. She sat down for a few minutes and then she went to the rear and stood outside on the platform, clutching a brass rod of the railing and looking back on the dropping darkness in which the hills seemed to be rushing together far behind as the train crashed on with its wake of spark-lit rolling smoke. A cinder stung her face, and when she lifted her hand to the spot, she saw that her glove was black with grime. With a little shiver of disgust she went back to her seat and with her face to the blackness rushing past her window she sat brooding—brooding. Why had Hale not met her? He had said he would and she had written him when she was coming and had telegraphed him at the station in New York when she started. Perhaps he HAD changed. She recalled that even his letters had grown less frequent, shorter, more hurried the past year—well, he should have his chance. Always, however, her mind kept going back to the people at the station and to her people in the mountains. They were the same, she kept repeating to herself—the very same and she was one of them. And always she kept thinking of her first trip to Lonesome Cove after her awakening and of what her next would be. That first time Hale had made her go back as she had left, in home-spun, sun-bonnet and brogans. There was the same reason why she should go back that way now as then—would Hale insist that she should now? She almost laughed aloud at the thought. She knew that she would refuse and she knew that his reason would not appeal to her now—she no longer cared what her neighbours and kinspeople might think and say. The porter paused at her seat.
“How much longer is it?” she asked.
“Half an hour, Miss.”
June went to wash her face and hands, and when she came back to her seat a great glare shone through the windows on the other side of the car. It was the furnace, a “run” was on and she could see the streams of white molten metal racing down the narrow channels of sand to their narrow beds on either side. The whistle shrieked ahead for the Gap and she nerved herself with a prophetic sense of vague trouble at hand.
* * * * * * *
At the station Hale had paced the platform. He looked at his watch to see whether he might have time to run up to the furnace, half a mile away, and board the train there. He thought he had and he was about to start when the shriek of the coming engine rose beyond the low hills in Wild Cat Valley, echoed along Powell's Mountain and broke against the wrinkled breast of the Cumberland. On it came, and in plain sight it stopped suddenly to take water, and Hale cursed it silently and recalled viciously that when he was in a hurry to arrive anywhere, the water-tower was always on the wrong side of the station. He got so restless that he started for it on a run and he had gone hardly fifty yards before the train came on again and he had to run back to beat it to the station—where he sprang to the steps of the Pullman before it stopped—pushing the porter aside to find himself checked by the crowded passengers at the door. June was not among them and straightway he ran for the rear of the car.
June had risen. The other occupants of the car had crowded forward and she was the last of them. She had stood, during an irritating wait, at the water-tower, and now as she moved slowly forward again she heard the hurry of feet behind her and she turned to look into the eager, wondering eyes of John Hale.
“June!” he cried in amazement, but his face lighted with joy and he impulsively stretched out his arms as though he meant to take her in them, but as suddenly he dropped them before the startled look in her eyes, which, with one swift glance, searched him from head to foot. They shook hands almost gravely.