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?"
"No. You tell him about it, James. You have seen her and talked with her. They were quarrelling about her, as I understand, and she thinks because she was the cause of the deed she must help him make retribution. Isn't that it, James? She knows