“He is everywhere.”
Then she understood.
“Oh, Doctor Allerton, may I go? Tell me I may go!” she pleaded.
For a long while he sat silent, while a memory of the long ago came stealing through the closed window. A face—a death—a promise kept through forty long years of celibacy. The face laughed at him as he sat silent there, as if he had pleased her well.
“Go,” he said.
And he raised his hand in benediction and blessed her.
CHAPTER XXXIX
The fussy little engine had at last completed its task and the train was ready to start. A crowd of small boys was hanging around it—the greatest marvel of the world to the mountain lads. Its big funnel-shaped smoke-stack sent wonder’s own thrills down their backs, and when the wheels slipped on the cast iron rails they shook with delight. “What a engine!” one of them said. “It’s ’most as tall as a man!”
The engineer was busy pulling off a sliver that had started from one of the rails, which experience had taught him might creep upward, farther and farther, till a car wheel caught it, and sent it through the bottom of a passenger coach, for it was but cast iron, after all.
Helen Preston turned to go, and her eyes caught sight of the Attacoa—highest of all the Blue Ridge, save the forehead of Grandfather’s Mountain. The stranger coming to the village sees it first, and the inhabitant turns invariably as to an old friend to say good-bye when he leaves.