Page:Cornelia Meigs--The windy hill.djvu/202

196 ford, in that same husky, broken voice, suddenly began to speak as though he were following his thoughts out loud.

"I don't know why I came back to Medford Valley," he said. "I had lived through every sort of thing since I went away, but I was making good at last. Martha—that's the girl I married, she was a miner's daughter—had helped me to go straight. I was working in a mine, harder work than I had ever dreamed of in my life. It was good for me, yet I kept telling myself that it was being in prison. Perhaps it was, but I had forgotten that prison was the place where I ought to be."

Oliver tilted back his head that he might hear better, but his only answer was an inarticulate sound like a mutter of agreement. To reach the valley as soon as possible and without mishap, was more important to him, at that moment, than explanations. But Janet looked up with round, wondering eyes, eager to hear the rest.

"I kept thinking how it was here at home, so green and clean and peaceful, not like that stark, bare mountain country where I seemed to be working my whole life away. I told myself that a certain portion of Medford Valley belonged to me, that I could come back and live a life of dignified idleness, if only I had my rights, if only Jasper would give me what was my own."

"But it wasn't true. You knew that he wouldn't keep what belonged to you," burst out Janet.