"Then, of course, you can see that she is one of the best of the mountain people, can't you? Well! She has promised to marry—promised to marry—think of it! one of the wildest, most reckless of those mountain boys, one that she knows very well has been in illicit distilling. He is a lawbreaker in that way; and, more than that, he drinks, and in a drunken row he shot dead his friend."
"Ah!" David rose, turned away, and again paced the piazza. Then he returned to his seat. "I see. The young man I tried to help off when I first arrived."
"Yes. There he is."
"I see. Handsome type."
"He's down here now, keeping quiet. How long it will last, no one knows. Justice is lax in the mountains. His father shot three or four men before he died himself of a gunshot wound which he received while resisting the officers of the law. If there's a man left in the family to follow this thing up, Frale will be hunted down and arrested or shot; otherwise, when things have cooled off a little up there, he will go back and open up the old business, and the tragedy will be repeated. James, you know how often after the best you could do and all their promises, they go back to it?"
"I admit it's always a question. They don't seem to be content in the low country. I think it is often a sort of natural gravitation back to the mountains where they were born and bred, more than it is depravity."
"I know, James, but that excuse won't help Cassandra."
"Why did she do it?" asked David. "She must have known to what such a marriage would bring her."
"Do it? That is the sort of girl she is. If she thought she ought, she would leap over that fall there."
"But why should she think she ought? Had she given her—promise—" David saw her as she appeared to him when she had said that word to him on the mountain, and it silenced him, but only for a moment. He would learn all he could of her motives now. He must—he would know. "I mean before he did this, before she went away to study—had she made him such a—promise?"