He had tilled the broad fields and gone in and out among the people , and their life had been his life . But his heart was not in his work . He wanted to go beyond the hills and seek what he knew must be there . The valley was too narrow , too placid . He longed for conflict and accomplishment . He felt power and desire and the lust of endeavour stirring in him . Oh , to go over the hills to a world where men lived ! Such had been the goal of all his dreams . When his mother died he sold the farm to his cousin , Stephen Marshall . He supposed it still belonged to him . Stephen had been a good sort of a fellow , a bit slow and plodding , perhaps , bovinely content to dwell within the hills , never hearkening or responding to the lure of the beyond . Yet it might be he had chosen the better part , to dwell thus on the land of his fathers , with a wife won in youth , and children to grow up around him . The childless , wifeless man looking down from the hill wondered if it might have been so with him had he been content to stay in the valley . Perhaps so . There had been Joyce . He wondered where Joyce was now and whom she had married , for of course she had married . Did she too live somewhere down there in the valley , the matronly , contented mother of lads and lassies ? He could see her old home also , not so far from his own , just across a green meadow by way of a footpath and stile and through the firs beyond it . How often he had traversed that path in the old days , knowing that Joyce would be waiting at the end of it among the firs -- Joyce , the playmate of childhood , the sweet confidante and companion of youth ! They had never been avowed lovers , but he had loved her then , as a boy loves , although he had never said a word of love to her .
Joyce alone knew XXXXX his longings and his ambitions and his dreams ; he had told them all to her freely , sure of the understanding and sympathy no other soul in the valley could give him .
across although around as from if in of on to