Two or three travelers, as he passed, watched him out of sight, with
wondering gaze. Those he met, turned their heads to look after him.
Aaron King's thoughts, as he rode, kept pace with his horse's flying feet.
The points along the way, where he and the famous novelist had stopped to
rest, and to enjoy the beauty of the scene, recalled vividly to his mind
all that those weeks in the mountains had brought to him. Backward from
that day when he had for the first time set his face toward the hills, his
mind traveled--almost from day to day--until he stood, again, in that
impoverished home of his boyhood to which he had been summoned from his
studies abroad. As he urged his laboring horse forward, in the eagerness
and anxiety of his love for Sibyl Andres, he lived again that hour when
his dying mother told her faltering story of his father's dishonor; when
he knew, for the first time, her life of devotion to him, and learned of
her sacrifice--even unto poverty--that he might, unhampered, be fitted for
his life work; and when, receiving his inheritance, he had made his solemn
promise that the purpose and passion of his mother's years of sacrifice
should, in him and in his work, be fulfilled.
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