“B-better go to bed now, Cynthy,” he said; “m-must be worn out—­m-must be worn out.”

He stooped and kissed her on the forehead.  It was thus that Jethro Bass accepted his sentence.

CHAPTER XIII

At sunrise, in that Coniston hill-country, it is the western hills which are red; and a distant hillock on the meadow farm which was soon to be Eden’s looked like the daintiest conical cake with pink icing as Cynthia surveyed the familiar view the next morning.  There was the mountain, the pastures on the lower slopes all red, too, and higher up the dark masses of bristling spruce and pine and hemlock mottled with white where the snow-covered rocks showed through.

Sunrise in January is not very early, and sunrise at any season is not early for Coniston.  Cynthia sat at her window, and wondered whether that beautiful landscape would any longer be hers.  Her life had grown up on it; but now her life had changed.  Would the beauty be taken from it, too?  Almost hungrily she gazed at the scene.  She might look upon it again—­many times, perhaps—­but a conviction was strong in her that its daily possession would now be only a memory.

Mr. Satterlee was as good as his word, for he was seated in the stage when it drew up at the tannery house, ready to go to Brampton.  And as they drove away Cynthia took one last look at Jethro standing on the porch.  It seemed to her that it had been given her to feel all things, and to know all things:  to know, especially, this strange man, Jethro Bass, as none other knew him, and to love him as none other loved him.  The last severe wrench was come, and she had left him standing there alone in the cold, divining what was in his heart as though it were in her own.  How worthless was this mighty power which he had gained, how hateful, when he could not bestow the smallest fragment of it upon one whom he loved?  Someone has described hell as disqualification in the face of opportunity.  Such was Jethro’s torment that morning as he saw her drive away, the minister in the place where he should have been, at her side, and he, Jethro Bass, as helpless as though he had indeed been in the pit among the flames.  Had the prudential committee at Brampton promised the appointment ten times over, he might still have obtained it for her by a word.  And he must not speak even that word.  Who shall say that a large part of the punishment of Jethro Bass did not come to him in the life upon this earth.

Some such thoughts were running in Cynthia’s head as they jingled away to Brampton that dazzling morning.  Perhaps the stage driver, too, who knew something of men and things and who meddled not at all, had made a guess at the situation.  He thought that Cynthia’s spirits seemed lightened a little, and he meant to lighten them more; so he joked as much as his respect for his passengers would permit, and told the news of Brampton.  Not the least of the