---

with a gentle chuckle, "or, to be exact, if I stood in your two boots and you in my one, as sure as fate, you'd be thinking my way and I yours. Well, I wish I could help you, but as I can't I'll be moving slowly back."

        He shuffled off on his crutches, painfully swinging himself a step at a time, and Christopher, after a moment's puzzled stare at his pathetic figure, returned diligently to his work.

        His passage along the green aisle was very slow, and when at last he reached the extreme end by the little beaten path and felled the last stalk on his left side he straightened himself for a moment's rest, and stood, bareheaded, gazing over the broad field, which looked as if a windstorm had blown in an even line along the edge, scattering the outside plants upon the ground. The thought of his work engrossed him at the instant, and it was with something of a start that he became conscious presently of Maria Fletcher's voice at his back. Wheeling about dizzily, he found her leaning on the old rail fence, regarding him with shining eyes in which the tears seemed hardly dried.

        "I have just left Will," she said; "the doctor has set his leg and he is sleeping. It was my last chance - I am going away to-morrow - and I wanted to tell you - I wanted so to tell you how grateful we feel."

        The knife dropped from his hand, and he came slowly along the little path to the fence.

        "I fear you've got an entirely wrong idea about me," he answered. "It was nothing in the world to make a fuss over - and I swear to you if it were

the last word I ever spoke - I did not know it was your brother."

        "As if that mattered!" she exclaimed, and he remembered vaguely that he had heard her use the words before. "You risked your life to save his life: we know that. Grandpa saw it all - and the horses dragged you, too. You would have been killed if the others hadn't run up when they did. And you tell me - as if that made it any the less brave - that you didn't know it was Will."

        "I didn't," he repeated stubbornly. "I didn't."

        "Well, he does," she responded, smiling; "and he wants to thank you himself when he is well enough."

        "If you wish to do me a kindness, for heaven's sake tell him not to," he said irritably. "I hate all such foolishness - it makes me out a hypocrite!"

        "I knew you'd hate it; I told them so," tranquilly responded the girl. "Aunt Saidie wanted to rush right over last night, but I wouldn't let her. All brave men dislike to have a fuss made over them, I know."

        "Good Lord!" ejaculated Christopher, and stopped short, impatiently desisting before the admiration illumining her eyes. From her former disdain he had evidently risen to a height in her regard that was romantic in its ardour. It was in vain that he told himself he cared for one emotion as little as for the other - in spite of his words, the innocent fervour in her face swept over the barrier of his sullen pride.

        "So you are going away to-morrow," he said at last; "and for good?"

        "For good, yes. I go abroad very unexpectedly for perhaps five years. My things aren't half ready, but business is of more importance than a woman's clothes."

        "Will you be alone?"

        "Oh, no."

        "Who goes with you?" he insisted bluntly.

        As she reddened, he watched the colour spread slowly to her throat and ear.

        "I am to be married, you know," she answered, with her accustomed composure of tone.

        His lack of gallantry was churlish.

        "To that dummy with the brown mustache?" he inquired.

        A little hysterical laugh broke from her, and she made a hopeless gesture of reproof. "Your manners are really elementary," she remarked, adding immediately: "I assure you he isn't in the least a dummy - he is considered a most delightful talker."

        He swept the jest impatiently aside.

        "Why do you do it?" he demanded.

        "Do what?"

        "You know what I mean. Why do you marry him?"

        Again she bit back a laugh. It was all very primitive, very savage, she told herself; it was, above all, different from any of the life that she had known, and yet, in a mysterious way, it was familiar, as if the unrestrained emotion in his voice stirred some racial memory within her brain.

        "Why do I marry him?" She drew a step away, looking at sky and field. "Why do I marry him?" She hesitated slightly, "Oh, for many

reasons, and all good ones - but most of all because I love him."

        "You do not love him."

        "I beg your pardon, but I do."

        For the first time in her life, as her eyes swept over the landscape, she was conscious of a peculiar charm in the wildness of the country, in the absence of all civilising influences - in the open sky, the red road, the luxuriant tobacco, the coarse sprays of yarrow blooming against the fence; in the homely tasks, drawing one close to the soil, and the harvesting of the ripened crops, the milking of the mild-eyed cows, and in the long still days, followed by the long still nights.

        Their eyes met, and for a time both were silent. She felt again the old vague trouble at his presence, the appeal of the rustic tradition, the rustic temperament; of all the multiplied inheritances of the centuries, which her education had not utterly extinguished.

        "Well, I hope you'll live to regret it," he said suddenly, with bitter passion.

        The words startled her, and she caught her breath with a tremor.

        "What an awful wish!" she exclaimed lightly.

        "It's an honest one."

        "I'm not sure I shouldn't prefer a little polite lying."

        "You won't get it from me. I hope you'll live to regret it. Why shouldn't I?"

        "Oh, you might at least be decently human. If you hadn't been so brave yesterday, I might almost think you a savage to-day."

        "I didn't do that on purpose, I told you," he returned angrily.

        "You can't make believe that - it's no use trying."

        "I shan't try - though it's the gospel truth - and you'll find it out some day."

        "When?"

        "Oh, when the time comes, that's all."

        "You speak in riddles," she said, "and I always hated guessing." Then she held out her hand with a pleasant, conventional smile. "I am grateful to you in spite of everything," she said; "and now good-by."

        His arms hung at his side. "No, I won't shake hands," he answered. "What's the use?"

        "As you please - only, it's the usual thing at parting."

        "All the same, I won't do it," he said stubbornly. "My hands are not clean." He held them out, soiled with earth and the stains from the tobacco.

        For an instant her eyes dwelt upon him very kindly.

        "Oh, I shan't mind the traces of honest toil," she said; but as he still hung back, she gave a friendly nod and went quickly homeward along the road. As her figure vanished among the trees, a great bitterness oppressed him, and, picking up his knife, he went back doggedly to his work.

        In the kitchen, when he returned to dinner some hours later, he found Cynthia squinting heavily over the torn coat.

        "I must say you ruined this yesterday," she remarked, looking up from her needle, "and if you'd

listened to me you could have stopped those horses just as well in your old jean clothes. I had a feeling that something was going to happen, when I saw you with this on."

        "I don't doubt it," he responded, wofully eying the garment spread on her knees, "and I may as well admit right now that I made a mess of the whole thing. To think of my wasting the only decent suit I had on a Fletcher - after saving up a year to buy it, too."

        Cynthia twitched the coat inside out and placed a square patch over the ragged edges of the rent. "I suppose I ought to be thankful you saved the boy's life," she observed, "but I can't say that I feel particularly jubilant when I look at these armholes. Of course, when I first heard of it the coat seemed a mere trifle, but when I come to the mending I begin to wish you'd been heroic in your every-day clothes. There'll have to be a patch right here, but I don't reckon it will show much. Do you mind?"

        "I'd rather wear a mustard plaster than a patch any time," he replied gravely; "but as long as there's no help for it, lay them on - don't slight the job a bit because of my feelings. I can stand pretty well having my jean clothes darned and mended, but I do object to dressing up on Sundays in a bed-quilt."

        "Well, you'll have to, that's all," was Cynthia's reassuring rejoinder. "It's the price you pay for being a hero when you can't afford it."

CHAPTER VI
SHOWS FLETCHER IN A NEW LIGHT

most it would be over and the bridal pair beginning their long journey. Looking down from the next landing, he had further assurance of the sincerity of Maria's smile when he saw the lovers meet and embrace within the shadow of the staircase; and the sight stirred within his heart something of that wistful pity with which those who have learned how little emotion counts in life watch the first exuberance of young passion. A bright beginning whatever be the ending, he thought a little sadly, as he turned the handle of the sick-room door.

        The boy's fever had risen and he tossed his arms restlessly upon the counterpane. "Stand out of my sunshine, grandpa," he said fretfully, as the lawyer sat down by his bedside.

        Fletcher shuffled hastily from before the window, and it struck Carraway almost ludicrously that in all the surroundings in which he had ever seen him the man had never appeared so hopelessly out of place - not even when he had watched him at prayer one Sunday in the little country church.

        "There, you're in it again," complained the boy in his peevish tones.

        Fletcher lifted a cup from the table and brought it over to the bed.

        "Maybe you'd like a sip of this beef tea now," he suggested persuasively. "It's most time for your medicine, you know, so jest a little taste of this beforehand."

        "I don't like it, grandpa; it's too salt."

        "Thar, now, that's jest like Saidie," blurted Fletcher angrily. "Saidie, you've gone and made his beef tea too salt."

        Miss Saidie appeared instantly at the door of the adjoining room, and without seeking to diminish the importance of her offense, mildly offered to prepare a fresh bowl of the broth.

        "I'm packing Maria's clothes now," she said, "but I'll be through in a jiffy, and then I'll make the soup. I've jest fixed up the parlour for the marriage. Maria insists on having a footstool to kneel on - she ain't satisfied with jest standing with jined hands before the preacher, like her pa and ma did before she was born."

        "Well, drat Maria's whims," retorted Fletcher impatiently; "they can wait, I reckon, and Will's got to have his tea, so you'd better fetch it."

        "But I don't want it, grandpa," protested the boy, flushed and troubled. "You worry me so, that's all. Please stop fooling with those curtains - I like the sunshine."

        "A nap is what he needs, I suspect," observed Carraway, touched, in spite of himself, by the lumbering misery of the man.

        "Ah, that's it," agreed Fletcher, catching readily at the suggestion. "You jest turn right over and take yo' nap, and when you wake up - well, I'll give you anything you want. Here, swallow this stuff down quick and you'll sleep easy."

        He brought the medicine glass to the bedside, and, slipping his great hairy hand under the pillow, gently raised the boy's head.

        "I reckon you'd like a brand new saddle when you git up," he remarked in a coaxing voice.

        "I'd rather have a squirrel gun, grandpa; I want to go hunting."

        Fletcher's face clouded.

        "I'm afraid you'd git shot, sonny."

        With his lips to the glass, Will paused to haggle over the price of his obedience.

        "But I want it," he insisted; "and I want a pack of hounds, too, to chase rabbits."

        "Bless my boots! You ain't going to bring any driveling beasts on the place, air you?"

        "Yes, I am, grandpa. I won't swallow this unless you say I may."

        "Oh, you hurry up and git well, and then we'll see - we'll see," was Fletcher's answer. "Gulp this stuff right down now and turn over."

        The boy still hesitated.

        "Then I may have the hounds," he said; "that new litter of puppies Tom Spade has, and I'll get Christopher Blake to train 'em for me."

        The pillow shook under his head, and as he opened his mouth to drink, a few drops of the liquid spilled upon the bedclothes.

        "I reckon Zebbadee's a better man for hounds," suggested Fletcher, setting down the glass.

        "Oh, Zebbadee's aren't worth a cent - they can't tell a rabbit from a watering-pot. I want Christopher Blake to train 'em, and I want to see him about it to-day. Tell him to come, grandpa."

        "I can't, sonny - I can't; you git your hounds and we'll find a better man. Why, thar's Jim Weatherby; he'll do first rate."

        "His dogs are setters," fretted Will. "I don't want him; I want Christopher Blake - he saved my life, you know."

        "So he did, so he did," admitted Fletcher; "and

he shan't be a loser by that, suh," he added, turning to Carraway. "When you go over thar, you can carry my check along for five hundred dollars."

        The lawyer smiled. "Oh, I'll take it," he answered, "and I'll very likely bring it back."

        The boy looked at Carraway. "You tell him to come, sir," he pleaded. His eyes were so like Fletcher's - small, sparkling, changing from blue to Brown - that the lawyer's glance lingered upon the other's features, seeking some resemblance in them, also. To his surprise he found absolutely none - the high, blue-veined forehead beneath the chestnut hair; the straight, delicate nose; the sensitive, almost effeminate curve of the mouth, must have descended from the "worthless drab" whom he had beheld in the severe white light of Fletcher's scorn. For the first time it occurred to Carraway that the illumination had been too intense.

        "I'll tell him, certainly," he said quietly after a moment; "but I don't promise that he'll come, you understand."

        "Oh, I won't thank him," cried the boy eagerly. "It isn't for that I want him - tell him so. Maria says he hates a fuss."

        "I'll deliver your message word for word," responded the lawyer. "Not only that, I'll add my own persuasion to it, though I fear I have little influence with your neighbour."

        "Tell him I beg him to come," insisted the boy, and the urgent voice remained with Carraway throughout the day.

        It was not until the afternoon, however, when he had tossed his farewell handful of rice at the

departing carriage and met Maria's last disturbed look at the Hall, that he found time to carry Will's request and Fletcher's check to Christopher Blake. The girl had shown her single trace of emotion over the boy's pillow, where she had shed a few furtive tears, and the thought of this was with Carraway as he walked meditatively along the red clay road, down the long curves of which he saw the carriage rolling leisurely ahead of him. As a bride, Maria puzzled him no less than she had done at their first meeting, and the riddle of her personality he felt to be still hopelessly unsolved. Was it merely repression of manner that annoyed him in her? he questioned, or was it, as he had once believed, the simple lack of emotional power? Her studied speech, her conventional courtesy, seemed to confirm the first impression she had made; then her dark, troubled gaze and the sullen droop of her mouth returned to give the lie to what he could but feel to be a possible misjudgment. In the end, he concluded wisely enough that, like the most of us, she was probably but plastic matter for the mark of circumstance - that her development would be, after all, according to the events she was called upon to face. The possibility that Destiny, which is temperament, should have already selected her as one of those who come into their spiritual heritage only through defeat, did not enter into the half-humorous consideration with which he now regarded her.

        Turning presently into the sunken road by the ice-pond, he came in a little while to the overgrown fence surrounding the Blake farm. In the tobacco field beyond the garden he saw Christopher's blue-clad

figure rising from a blur of green, and, following the ragged path amid the yarrow, he joined the young man where he stood at work.

        As the lawyer reached his side Christopher glanced up indifferently to give a nod of welcome. His crop had all been cut, and he was now engaged in hanging the wilting plants from long rails supported by forked poles. At his feet there were little green piles of tobacco, and around him from the sunbaked earth rose a headless army of bruised and bleeding stubble.

        So thriftless were the antiquated methods he followed that the lawyer, as he watched him, could barely repress a smile. Two hundred years ago the same crop was probably raised, cut and cured on the same soil in the same careless and primitive fashion. Beneath all the seeming indifference to success or failure Carraway discerned something of that blind reliance upon chance which is apt to be the religious expression of a rural and isolated people.

        "Yes, I'll leave it out awhile, I reckon, unless the weather changes," replied Christopher, in answer to the lawyer's inquiry.

        "Well, it promises fair enough," returned Carraway pleasantly. "They tell me, by the way, that the yellow, sun-cured leaf is coming into favour in the market. You don't try that, eh?"

        Christopher shook his head, and, kneeling on the ground, carelessly sorted his pile of plants. "I learned to cure it indoors," he answered, "and I reckon I'll keep to the old way. The dark leaf is what the people about here like - it makes the

sweeter chew, they think. As for me, I hate the very smell of it."

        "That's odd, and I'll wager you're the only man in the county who neither smokes nor chews."

        "Oh, I handle it, you see. The smell and the stain of it are well soaked in. I sometimes wonder if all the water in the river of Jordan could wash away the blood of the tobacco worm."

        With a laugh in which there was more bitterness than mirth, he stretched out his big bronzed hands, and Carraway saw that the nails and finger-tips were dyed bright green.

        "It does leave its mark," observed the lawyer, and felt instantly that the speech was inane.

        Christopher went on quietly with his work, gathering up the plants and hanging the slit stalks over the long poles, while the peculiar heavy odour of the freshly cut crop floated unpleasantly about them.

        For a time Carraway watched him in silence, his eyes dwelling soberly upon the stalwart figure. In spite of himself, the mere beauty of outline touched him with a feeling of sadness, and when he spoke at last it was in a lowered tone.

        "You have, perhaps, surmised that my call is not entirely one of pleasure," he began awkwardly; "that I am, above all, the bearer of a message from Mr. Fletcher."

        "From Fletcher?" repeated Christopher coolly. "Well, I never heard a message of his yet that wasn't better left undelivered."

        "I am sure I am correct in saying," Carraway went on steadily and not without definite purpose,

"that he hopes you will be generous enough to let bygones be bygones."

        Christopher nodded.

        "He feels, of course," pursued the lawyer, "that his obligation to you is greater than he can hope to repay. Indeed, I think if you knew the true state of the case your judgment of him would be softened. The boy who so nearly lost his life is the one human being whom Fletcher loves better than himself - better than his own soul, I had almost said."

        Christopher looked up attentively. "Who'd have thought it," he muttered beneath his breath.

        Judging that he had at last made a beginning at the plastering over of old scars, Carraway went on as if the other had not spoken. "So jealous is his affection in this instance, that I believe his granddaughter's marriage is something of a relief to him. He is positively impatient of any influence over the boy except his own - and that, I fear, is hardly for good."

        Picking up a clod of earth, Christopher crumbled it slowly to dust. "So the little chap comes in for all this, does he?" he asked, as his gaze swept over the wide fields in the distance. "He comes in for all that is mine by right, and Fletcher's intention is I dare say, that he'll reflect honour upon the theft?"

        "That he'll reflect honour upon the name - yes. It is the ambition of his grandfather, I believe, that the lad should grow up to be respected in the county - to stand for something more than he himself has done."

        "Well, he'll hardly stand for more of a rascal,"

remarked Christopher quietly; and then, as his eyes rested on the landscape, he appeared to follow moodily some suggestion which had half escaped him. "Then the way to touch the man is through the boy, I presume," he said abruptly.

        Arrested by the words, the lawyer looked down quickly, but the other, still kneeling upon the ground, was fingering a plant he had just picked up. "Fine leaves, eh?" was the remark that met Carraway's sudden start.

        "To touch him, yes," replied the lawyer thoughtfully. "Whatever heart he has is given to his grandson, and when you saved the lad's life the other day you placed Fletcher in your debt for good. Of his gratitude I am absolutely sure, and as a slight expression of it he asked me to hand you this."

        He drew the check from his pocket, and leaning over, held it out to Christopher. To his surprise, the young man took it from him, but the next moment he had torn it roughly in two and handed it back again. "So you may as well return it to him," he said, and, rising slowly from the ground, he stood pushing the loose plants together with his foot.

        "I feared as much," observed Carraway, placing the torn slip of paper in his pocket. "Your grudge is of too long standing to mend in a day. Be that as it may, I have a request to make of you from the boy himself which I hope you will not refuse. He has taken a liking to you, it appears, and as he will probably be ill for some weeks, he begs that you will come back with me to see him."

         He finished a little wistfully, and stood looking up

at the young man who towered a good head and shoulders above him.

        "I may as well tell you once for all," returned Christopher, choking over the words, "that you've given me as much of Fletcher as I can stand and a long sight more than I want. If anybody but you had brought me that piece of paper with Bill Fletcher's name tagged to it I'd have rammed it down his throat before this. As it is, you may tell him from me that when I have paid him to the last drop what I owe him - and not till then - will I listen to any message he chooses to send me. I hate him, and that's my affair; I mean to be even with him some day, and I reckon that's my affair, too. One thing I'm pretty sure of, and that is that it's not yours. Is your visit over, or will you come into the house?"

        "I'll be going back now," replied the lawyer, shrinking from before the outburst, "but if I may have the pleasure, I'll call upon your mother in the morning."

        Christopher shook the hand which he held out, and then spoke again in the same muffled voice. "You may tell him one thing more," he pursued, "and that is, that it's the gospel truth I didn't know it was his grandson in the wagon. Why, man, there's not a Fletcher on this earth whose neck I'd lift my little finger to save!"

        Then, as Carraway passed slowly along the ragged path to the sunken road, he stood looking after him with a heavy frown upon his brow. His rage was at white heat within him, and, deny it as he would, he knew now that within the last few weeks

his hatred had been strengthened by the force of a newer passion which had recoiled upon itself. Since his parting with Maria Fletcher the day before, he had not escaped for a breath from her haunting presence. She was in his eyes and in the air he breathed; the smell of flowers brought her sweetness to him, and the very sunshine lying upon the September fields thrilled him like the warmth of her rare smile. He found himself fleeing like a hunted animal from the memory which he could not put away, and despite the almost frenzied haste with which he presently fell to work, he saw always the light and gracious figure which had come to him along the red clay road. The fervour which had shone suddenly in her eyes, the quiver of her mouth as she turned away, the poise of her head, the gentle, outstretched hand he had repulsed, the delicate curve of her wrist beneath the falling sleeve, the very lace on her bosom fluttering in the still weather as if a light wind were blowing - these things returned to torture him like the delirium of fever. Appealing as the memory was, it aroused in his distorted mind all the violence of his old fury, and he felt again the desire for revenge working like madness in his blood. It was as if every emotion of his life swept on, to empty itself at last into the wide sea of his hatred.

CHAPTER VII
IN WHICH HERO AND VILLAIN APPEAR AS ONE

        "I want to speak to you a moment, Mr. Blake," began the boy, in the assured tones of the rich man to the poor. The Blake hounds made a sudden rush at the puppies, to be roughly ordered to heel by their master.

        "Well, fire away," returned the young man coolly. "But I may as well warn you that it's more than likely it will be a clear waste of breath. I'll have nothing to do with you or your sort." He leaned on his gun and looked indifferently over the misty fields, where the autumn's crop of life-everlasting shone silver in the sunrise.

        "I don't see why you hate me so," said the boy wonderingly, checking the too frolicsome adventures of the puppies in the direction of the hounds. "I've always liked you, you know, even before you saved my life - because you're the straightest shot and the best trainer of hounds about here. Grandpa

says I mustn't have anything to do with you, but I will anyway, if I please."

        "Oh, you will, will you?" was Christopher's rejoinder, as he surveyed him with the humorous contempt which the strong so often feel for the weak of the same sex. "Well, I suppose I'll have my say in the matter, and strangely enough I'm on your grandfather's side. The clearer you keep of me the better it will be for you, my man."

        "That's just like grandpa all over again," protested the boy; "and when it comes to that, he needn't know anything about it - he doesn't know half that I do, anyway; he blusters so about things."

        Christopher's gaze returned slowly from the landscape and rested inquiringly upon the youthful features before him, seeking in them some definite promise of the future. The girlish look of the mouth irritated him ludicrously, and half-forgotten words of Carraway's awoke within his memory.

        "Fletcher loves but one thing on this earth, and his ambition is that the boy shall be respected in the county." A Fletcher respected in the very stronghold of a Blake! He laughed aloud, and then spoke hurriedly as if to explain the surprising mirth in his outburst.

        "So you came to pay a visit to your nearest neighbour and are afraid your grandfather will find it out? Then you'll get a spanking, I dare say."

        Will blushed furiously, and stood awkwardly scraping up a pile of sand with the sole of his boot. "I'm not a baby," he blurted out at last, "and I'll go where I like, whatever he says."

        "He keeps a pretty close watch over you, I reckon.

Perhaps he's afraid you'll become a man and step into his shoes before he knows it."

        "Oh, he can't find me out, all the same," said the boy slyly. "He thinks I've gone over to Mr. Morrison's now to do my Greek - he's crazy about my learning Greek, and I hate it - and, you bet your life, he'll be hopping mad if he finds I've given him the slip."

        "He will, will he?" remarked Christopher, and the thought appeared to afford him a peculiar satisfaction. For the first time the frown left his brow and his tone lost its insolent contempt. Then he came forward suddenly and laid his hand upon the gate. "Well, I can't waste my morning," he said. "You'd better run back home and play the piano. I'm off."

        "I don't play the piano - I'm not a girl," declared the boy; "and what I want is to get you to train my hounds for me. I'd like to go hunting with you to-day."

        "Oh, I can't be bothered with babies," sneered Christopher in reply. "You'd fall down, most likely, and scratch your knees on the briers, and then you'd run straight home to blab to Fletcher."

        "I won't!" cried Will angrily. "I'll never blab. He'd be too mad, I tell you, if he found it out."

        "Well, I don't want you anyhow, so get out of my way. You'd better look sharp after your pups or the hounds will chew them up."

        The boy stood midway of the road, kicking the dust impatiently ahead of him. His lips quivered with disappointment, and the expression gave them a singularly wistful beauty.

        "I'll give you all my pocket money if you'll take me with you," he pleaded suddenly, stretching out a handful of silver.

        With a snarl Christopher pushed his arm roughly aside. "Put up your money, you fool," he said; "I don't want it."

        "Oh, you don't, don't you?" taunted the other, raging with wounded pride. "Why, grandpa says you're as poor as Job's turkey after it was plucked."

        It was an old joke of Fletcher's, who, in giving utterance to it, little thought of the purpose it would finally be made to serve, for Christopher, halting suddenly at the words, swung round in the cloud of dust and stood regarding the grandson of his enemy with a thoughtful and troubled look. The lawyer's words sounded so distinctly in his ears that he glanced at the boy with a start, fearing that they had been spoken aloud: "His grandson is the sole living thing that Fletcher loves." Again the recollection brought a laugh from him, which he carelessly threw off upon the frolics of the puppies. Then the frown settled slowly back upon his brow, and the brutal look, which Carraway had found so disfiguring, crept out about his mouth.

        "I tell you honestly," he said gruffly, "that if you knew what was good for you, you'd scoot back along that road a good deal faster than you came. If you're such a headstrong fool as to want to come with me, however, I reckon you may do it. One thing, though, I'll have no puling ways."

        The boy jumped with pleasure. "Why, I knew all the time I'd get around you," he answered.

"I always do when I try; and may I shoot some with your shotgun?"

        "I'll teach you, perhaps."

        "When? Shall we start now? Call the dogs together - they're nosing in the ditch."

        Without taking the trouble to reply, Christopher strode off briskly along the road, and after waiting a moment to assemble his scattered puppies, Will caught up with him and broke into a running pace at his side. As they swung onward the two shadows - the long one and the short one - stretched straight and black behind them in the sunlight.

        "You're the biggest man about here, aren't you?" the boy asked suddenly, glancing upward with frank admiration.

        "I dare say. What of it?"

        "Oh, nothing; and your father was the biggest man of his time, Sol Peterkin says; and Aunt Mehitable remembers your grandfather, and he was the tallest man alive in his day. Who'll be the biggest when you die, I wonder? And, I say, isn't it a pity that such tall men had to live in such a little old house - I don't see how they ever got in the doors without stooping. Do you have to stoop when you go in and out.

        Christopher nodded.

        "Well, I shouldn't like that," pursued Will; "and I'm glad I don't live in such a little place. Now, the doors at the Hall are so high that I could stand on your shoulders and go in without bending my head. Let's try it some day. Grandpa wouldn't know."

        Christopher turned and looked at him suddenly.

"What would you say to going 'possum hunting one night?" he asked in a queer voice.

        "Whoopee!" cried the boy, tossing his hat in the air. "Will you take me?"

        "Well, it's hard work, you know," went on the other thoughtfully. "You'd have to get up in the middle of the night and steal out of the window without your grandfather's knowing it."

        "I should say so!"

        "We'd tramp till morning, probably, with the hounds, and Tom Spade would come along to bring his lanterns. Then when it was over we'd wind up for drinks at his store. It's great sport, I tell you, but it takes a man to stand it."

        "Oh, I'm man enough by now."

        "Not according to your grandfather's thinking."

        "What does he know about it? He's just an old fogy himself."

        "We'll see, we'll see. If he wants to keep you tied to nurse's strings too long, we must play him a trick. Why, when I was fourteen I could shoot with any man about here - and drink with him, too, for that matter. Nobody kept me back, you see."

        The boy looked up at Christopher with sparkling eyes, in which the eternal hero-worship of youth was already kindled.

        "Oh, you're splendid!" he exclaimed, "and I'm going to be just like you. Grandpa shan't keep me a baby any longer, I can tell you. All this Greek, now - he's crazy about my learning it - and I hate it. Do you know Greek?"

        Christopher laughed shortly. "Where does he live?" he inquired mockingly.

        For a moment the boy looked at him perplexed. "It's a language," he replied gravely; "and grandpa says it comes handy in a bargain, but I won't learn it. I hate school, anyway, and he swears he's going to send me back in two weeks. I hope I'll fall ill, and then he can't."

        "In two weeks," repeated the other reflectively; "well, a good deal may happen, I reckon, in two weeks."

        "Oh, lots!" agreed the boy with enthusiasm; "you'll let me chase rabbits with you every day - won't you? and teach me to shoot? and we'll go 'possum hunting one night and not get home till morning. It will be easy enough to fool grandpa. I'll take care of that, and if Aunt Saidie finds it out she'll never tell him - she never does tell on me. Here, let me take the gun awhile, will you?"

        Christopher handed him the gun, and they went on rapidly along the old road under the honey locusts that grew beyond the bend. They were nearing the place where Christopher, as a child of twelve, had waited with his bird-gun in the bushes to shoot Fletcher when he came in sight, and now as the recollection returned to him he unconsciously slackened his pace and cast his eyes about for the spot where he had stood. It was all there just as it had been that morning - the red clumps of sumach covered with gray dust, the dried underbrush piled along the fence, and the brown honeyshucks strewn in the sunny road. For the first time in his life he was glad at this instant that he had not killed Fletcher then - that his hand had been stayed that day to fall the heavier, it might be, at the appointed time.

        The boy still chatted eagerly, and when presently the hounds scented a rabbit in the sassafras beyond the fence, he started with a shout at the heels of the pursuing pack. Swinging himself over the brushwood, Christopher followed slowly across the waste of life-everlasting, tearing impatiently through the flowering net which the wild potato vine cast about his feet.

        Through the brilliant October day they hunted over the ragged fields, resting at noon to eat the slices of bread and bacon which Christopher had brought in his pocket. As they lay at full length in the sunshine upon the life-everlasting, the young man's gaze flew like a bird across the landscape - where the gaily decorated autumn fallows broke in upon the bare tobacco fields like gaudy patches on a homely garment - to rest upon the far-off huddled chimneys of Blake Hall. For a time he looked steadily upon them; then, turning on his side, he drew his harvest hat over his eyes and began a story of his early adventures behind the hounds, speaking in half-gay, half-bitter tones.

        In the mild autumn weather a faint haze overhung the landscape, changing from violet to gray as the shadows rose or fell. Around them the unploughed wasteland swept clear to the distant road, which wound like a muddy river beside the naked tobacco fields. Lying within the slight depression of a hilltop, the two were buried deep amid the life-everlasting, which shed its soft dust upon them and filled their nostrils with its ghostly fragrance.

        As he went on, Christopher found a savage delight in mocking the refinements of the boy's language,

in tossing him coarse expressions and brutal oaths much as he tossed scraps to the hounds, in touching with vulgar scorn all the conventional ideals of the household - obedience, duty, family affection, religion even. While he sank still lower in that defiant self-respect to which he had always clung doggedly until to-day, there was a fierce satisfaction in the knowledge that as he fell he dragged Will Fletcher with him - that he had sold himself to the devil and got his price.

        This unholy joy was still possessing him when at nightfall, exhausted, dirty, briar-scratched, and bearing their strings of game, they reached Tom Spade's, and Christopher demanded raw whisky in the little room behind the store. Sol Peterkin was there, astride his barrel, and as they entered he gave breath to a low whistle of astonishment.

        "Why, your grandpa's been sweepin' up the county for you!" he exclaimed to Will.

        "So he's found out I wasn't at the Morrisons'," said the boy a little nervously. "I'd better be going home, I reckon, and get it over."

        Christopher drained his glass of whisky, and then, refilling it, pushed it across the table.

        "What! Aren't you man enough to swallow a thimbleful?" he asked, with a laugh. His face was flushed, and the dust of the roads showed in streaks upon his forehead, where the crown of his straw hat had drawn a circle around his moist fair hair. The hand with which he touched the glass trembled slightly, and his eyes were so reckless that, after an instant's frightened silence, Peterkin cried out in alarm:

        "For the Lord's sake, Mr. Christopher, you're not yourself - it's the way his father went, you know!"

        "What of it?" demanded Christopher, turning his dangerous look upon the little man. "If there's a merrier way to go, I'd like to know it. "

        Peterkin drew over to the table and laid a restraining hold on the boy's arm. "Put that down, sonny," he said. "I couldn't stand it, and you may be sure it'll do you no good. It will turn your stomach clean inside out."

        "He took it," replied the boy stubbornly, "and I'll drink it if he says so." He lifted the glass and stood looking inquiringly at the man across from him. "Shall I drink it?" he asked, and waited with a boyish swagger.

        Christopher gave a short nod. "Oh, not if you're afraid of it," he responded roughly; and then, as Will threw back his head and the whisky touched his lips, the other struck out suddenly and sent the glass shivering to the floor. "Go home, you fool!" he cried, "and keep clear of me for good and all."

        A moment afterward he had passed from the room, through the store, and was out upon the road.

CHAPTER VIII
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA

        "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the foods drown it," he read in his even tones; "if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned."

        The old lady tapped the arm of her chair and turned her sightless eyes upon the Bible, as if Solomon in person stood there awaiting judgment.

        "I always liked that verse, brother," she remarked, "though I am not sure that I consider it entirely proper reading for the young. Aren't you tired walking, Lila?"

        "Oh, no, mother."

        "Well, we mustn't take the Scriptures literally,

you know, my child; if we did, I fear a great deal of trouble would come of it - and surely it is a pity to magnify the passion of love when so very many estimable persons get along quite comfortably without it. You remember my remarking how happy Miss Belinda Morrison always appeared to be, and so far as I know she never had a suitor in her life, though she lived to be upward of eighty."

        "Oh, mother! and yet you were so madly in love with father - you remember the fancy ball."

        "The fancy ball occupied only one night, my dear, and I've had almost seventy years. I married for love, as you certainly know - at my age, I suppose I might as well admit it - but the marriage happened to be also entirely suitable, and I hope that I should never have been guilty of anything so indelicate as to fall in love with a gentleman who wasn't a desirable match."

        Lila flushed and bit her lip.

        "I don't care about stations in life, nor blood, nor anything like that," she protested

        The old lady sighed. "We won't have any more of Solomon, Tucker," she observed. "I fear he will put notions into the child's head. Not care about blood, indeed! What are we coming to, I wonder? Well, well, I suppose it is what I deserve for allowing myself to fall so madly in love with your father. When I look back now it seems to me that I could have achieved quite as much with a great deal less expenditure of emotion."

        "Now, now, Lucy," said Tucker, closing the gilt clasps of the Bible, "you're not yet seventy, and by the time you reach eighty you will see things

clearer. I'm a good deal younger than you, but I'm two-thirds in the grave already, which makes a difference. My life's been long and pleasant as it is, but when I glance back upon it now I tell you the things I regret least in it are my youthful follies. A man must be very far in his dotage, indeed, when he begins to wear a long face over the sharp breaths that he drew in youth. I came very near ruining myself for a woman once, and the fact that I was ready to do it - even though I didn't - is what in the past I like best to recall to-day. It makes it all easier and better, somehow, and it seems to put a zest into the hours I spend now on my old bench. To have had one emotion that was bigger than you or your universe is to have had life, my dear."

        The old lady wiped her eyes. "It may be so, brother, it may be so," she admitted; "but not before Lila. Is that you, Christopher?"

        The young man came in and crossed slowly to the fire, bending for an instant over her chair. He was conscious suddenly that his clothes smelled of the fields and that the cold water of the well had not cleansed his face and hands. All at once it came to him with something of a shock that this bare, refined poverty was beyond his level - that about himself there was a coarseness, a brutality even, that made him shrink from contact with these others - with his mother, with Lila, with poor, maimed Tucker in his cotton suit. Was it only a distinction in manner, he wondered resentfully, or did the difference lie still deeper in some unlikeness of soul? For the first time in his life he felt ill at ease in the presence of those he loved, and as his eyes dwelt moodily on

Lila's graceful figure - upon the swell of her low bosom, her swaying hips, and the free movement of her limbs - he asked himself bitterly if he had aught in common with so delicate and rare a thing? And she? Was her blithe acquiescence, after all, but an assumed virtue, to whose outward rags she clung? Was it possible that there was here no inward rebellion, none of that warfare against Destiny which at once inspirited and embittered his heart?

        His face grew dark, and Uncle Boaz, coming in to stir the fire, glanced up at him and sighed.

        "You sho' do look down in de mouf, Marse Chris," he observed.

        Christopher started and then laughed blankly. "Well, I'm not proof against troubles, I reckon," he returned. "They're things none of us can keep clear of, you know."

        Uncle Boaz chuckled under his breath. "Go 'way f'om yer, Marse Chris; w'at you know 'bout trouble - you ain' even mah'ed yet."

        "Now, now, Boaz, don't be putting any ideas against marriage in his head," broke in the old lady.

        "He has remained single too long as it is, for, as dear old Bishop Deane used to say, it is surely the duty of every gentleman to take upon himself the provision of at least one helpless female. Not that I wish you to enter into marriage hastily, my son, or for any merely sentimental reasons; but I am sure, as things are, I believe one may have a great many trials even if one remains single, and though I know, of course, that I've had my share of trouble, still I never blamed your poor father one instant - not even for the loss of my six children, which

certainly would not have happened if I had not married him. But, as I've often told you, my dear, I think marriage should be rightly regarded more as a duty than as a pleasure. Your Aunt Susannah always said it was like choosing a partner at a ball; for my part, I think it resembles more the selecting of a brand of flour."

        "And to think that she once cried herself sick because Christopher went hunting during the honeymoon!" exclaimed Tucker, with his pleasant laugh.

        "Ah, life is long, and one's honeymoon is only a month, brother," retorted the old lady; "and I'm not saying anything against love, you know, when it comes to that. Properly conducted, it is a very pleasant form of entertainment. I've enjoyed it mightily myself; but I'm nearing seventy, and the years of love seem very small when I look back. There are many interesting things in a long life, and love for a man is only one among them; which brings me, after all, to the conclusion that the substance of anybody's house is a large price to pay for a single feeling."

        Christopher leaned over her and held out his arms.

        "It is your bedtime, mother - shall I carry you across?" he asked; and as the old lady nodded, he lifted her as if she were a child and held her closely against his breast, feeling his tenderness revive at the clasp of her fragile hands. When he placed her upon her bed, he kissed her good-night and went up the narrow staircase, stooping carefully to avoid the whitewashed ceiling above.

        Once in his room, he threw off his coat and sat down upon the side of his narrow bed, glancing

contemptuously at his bare brown arms, which showed through the openings in his blue shirt sleeves. He was still smarting from the memory of the sudden self-consciousness he had felt downstairs, and a pricking sensitiveness took possession of him, piercing like needles through the boorish indifference he had worn. All at once he realised that he was ashamed of himself - ashamed of his ignorance, his awkwardness, his brutality - and with the shame there awoke the slow anger of a sullen beast. Fate had driven him like a whipped hound to the kennel, but he could still snarl back his defiance from the shadow of his obscurity. The strong masculine beauty of his face - the beauty, as Cynthia had said, of the young David - confronted him in the little greenish mirror above the bureau, and in the dull misery of the eyes he read those higher possibilities, which even to-day he could not regard without a positive pang. What he might have been seemed forever struggling in his look with what he was, like the Scriptural wrestle between the angel of the Lord and the brute. The soul, distorted, bruised, defeated still lived within him, and it was this that brought upon him those hours of mortal anguish which he had so vainly tried to drown in his glass. From the mirror his gaze passed to his red and knotted hand, with its blunted nails, and the straight furrow grew deeper between his eyebrows. He remembered suddenly that his earliest ambition - the ambition of his childhood - had been that of a gentlemanly scholar of the old order. He had meant to sit in a library and read Horace, or to complete the laborious translation of the "Iliad" which his father had left

unfinished. Then his studies had ended abruptly with the Greek alphabet, and from the library he had passed out to the plough. In the years of severe physical labour which followed he had felt the spirit of the student go out of him forever, and after a few winter nights, when he fell asleep over his books, he had sunk slowly to the level of the small tobacco growers among whom he lived. With him also was the curse of apathy - that hereditary instinct to let the single throw decide the issue, so characteristic of the reckless Blakes. For more than two hundred years his people had been gay and careless livers on this very soil; among them all he knew of not one who had gone without the smallest of his desires, nor of one who had permitted his left hand to learn what his right one cast away. Big, blithe, mettlesome, they passed before him in a long, comely line, flushed with the pleasant follies which had helped to sap the courage in their descendants' veins.

        At first he had made a pitiable attempt to remain "within his class," but gradually, as time went on, this, too, had left him, and in the end he had grown to feel a certain pride in the ignorance he had formerly despised - a clownish scorn of anything above the rustic details of his daily life. There were days even when he took a positive pleasure in the degree of his abasement, when but for his blind mother he would have gone dirty, spoken in dialect, and eaten with the hounds. What he dreaded most now were the rare moments of illumination in which he beheld his degradation by a blaze of light - moments such as this when he seemed to stand alone upon the edge of the world, with the devil awaiting

him when he should turn at last. Years ago he had escaped these periods by strong physical exertion, working sometimes in the fields until he dropped upon the earth and lay like a log for hours. Later, he had yielded to drink when the darkness closed over him, and upon several occasions he had sat all night with a bottle of whisky in Tom Spade's store. Both methods he felt now to be ineffectual; fatigue could not deaden nor could whisky drown the bitterness of his soul. One thing remained, and that was to glut his hatred until it should lie quiet like a gorged beast.

        Steps sounded all at once upon the staircase, and after a moment the door opened and Cynthia entered.

        "Did you see Fleteher's boy, Christopher?" she asked. "His grandfather was over here looking for him."

        "Fletcher over here? Well, of all the impudence!"

        "He was very uneasy, but he stopped long enough to ask me to persuade you to part with the farm. He'd give three thousand dollars down for it, he said."

        She dusted the bureau abstractedly with her checked apron and then stood looking wistfully into the mirror.

        "Is that so? If he'd give me three million I wouldn't take it," answered Christopher.

        "It seems a mistake, dear," said Cynthia softly; "of course, I'd hate to oblige Fletcher, too, but we are so poor, and the money would mean so much to us. I used to feel as you do, but somehow I seem all worn out now - soul as well as body. I haven't the strength left to hate."

        "Well, I have," returned Christopher shortly,

"and I'll have it when I'm gasping over my last breath. You needn't bother about that business, Cynthia; I can keep up the family record on my own account. What's the proverb about us - 'a Blake can hate twice as long as most men can love' - that's my way, you know."

        "You didn't finish it," said Cynthia, turning from the bureau; "it's all downstairs in the 'Life of Bolivar Blake'; you remember Colonel Byrd got it off in a toast at a wedding breakfast, and Great-grandfather Bolivar was so proud of it he had it carved above his library door."

        "High and mighty old chap, wasn't he? But what's the rest?"

        "What he really said was: 'A Blake can hate twice as long as most men can love, and love twice as long as most men can live.' "

        Christopher looked down suddenly at his great bronzed hands. "Oh, he needn't have stuck the tail of it on," he remarked carelessly; "But the first part has a bully sound."

        When Cynthia had gone, he undressed and threw himself on the bed, but there was a queer stinging sensation in his veins, and he could not sleep. Rising presently, he opened the window, and in the frosty October air stood looking through the darkness to the light that twinkled in the direction of Blake Hall. Faint stars were shining overhead, and against the indistinct horizon something obscure and black was dimly outlined - perhaps the great clump of oaks that surrounded the old brick walls. Somewhere by that glimmer of light he knew that Fletcher sat hugging his ambition like a miser,

gloating over the grandson who would grow up to redeem his name. For the weak, foolish-mouthed boy Christopher at this moment knew neither tolerance nor compassion; and if he stooped to touch him, he felt that it was merely as he would grasp a stick which Fletcher had taken for his own defense. The boy himself might live or die, prosper or fail, it made little difference. The main thing was that in the end Bill Fletcher should be hated by his grandson as he was hated by the man whom he had wronged.

CHAPTER IX
AS THE TWIG IS BENT

        "Whar's Will, Saidie? It seems to me he sleeps late these days."

        "Oh, he was up hours ago," responded Miss Saidie, from behind the florid silver service. "I believe he has gone rabbit hunting with that young Blake."

        Fletcher laid down his knife and fork and glowered suspiciously upon his sister, the syrup from his last mouthful hanging in drops on his coarse gray beard.

        "With young Blake! Why, what's the meaning of that?" he inquired.

        "It's only that Will's taken to him, I think. Thar's no harm in this hunting rabbits that I can see, and it keeps the child out of doors, anyway. Fresh air is what the doctor said he needed, you know."

        "I don't like it; I don't like it," protested Fletcher; "those Blakes are as bad as bulldogs, and they've been so as far back as I can remember. The sooner a stop's put to this thing the better it'll be. How long has it been going on, I wonder?"

        "About ten days, I believe, and it does seem to give the boy such an interest. I can't help feeling it's a pity to break it up."

        "Oh, bother you and your feelings!" was Fletcher's retort. "If you'd had the sense you ought to have had, it never would have started; but you've always had a mushy heart, and I ought to have allowed for it, I reckon. Thar're two kind of women in this world, the mulish and the polish, an' when it comes to a man's taking his pick between 'em, the Lord help him. As for that young Blake - well, if I had to choose between him and the devil, I'd take up with the devil mighty fast, that's all."

        "Oh, Brother Bill, he saved the child's life!"

        "Well, he didn't do it on purpose; he told me so himself. I tried to settle that fair and square with him, you know, and he had the face to tear my check in half and send it back. Oh, I don't like this thing, I tell you, and I won't have it. I've no doubt it's at the bottom of all Will's cutting up about school, too. He was not well enough to go yesterday, he said, and here he's getting up this morning at daybreak and streaking, heaven knows whar, with a beggar. You may as well pack his things - I'll ship him off to-morrow if I'm alive."

        "I hope you won't scold him, anyway; he's not strong, you know, and it's good for him to have a little pleasure. I'm sure I can't see what you have against the Blakes, as far as that goes. I remember the old gentleman when I was a child - so fine, and clean, and pleasant, it was a sight just to see him ride by on his dappled horse. He always lifted his hat to me, too, when he passed me in the road,

and once he gave me some peaches for opening the red gate for him. I never could help liking him, and I was sorry when he lost his money and they had to sell the Hall."

        Fletcher choked over his coffee and grew purple in the face.

        "Hang your puling!" he cried harshly. "I'll not stand it, do you hear? The old man was a beggarly, cheating spendthrift, and the young one is a long sight worse. I'd rather wring Will's neck than have him mixed up with that batch of paupers."

        Miss Saidie shrunk back, frightened, behind the silver service.

        "Of course you know best, brother," she hastened to acknowledge, with her unfailing good-humour. "I'm as fond of the child as you are, I reckon - and of Maria, too, for that matter. Have you seen this photograph she sent me yesterday, taken at some outlandish place across the water? I declare, I had no idea she was half so handsome. She has begun to wear her hair low and has filled out considerable."

        "Well, there was room for it," commented Fletcher, as he glanced indifferently at the picture and laid it down. "Get Will's clothes packed to-day, remember. He starts off to-morrow morning, rain or shine."

        Pushing back his chair, he paused to gulp a last swallow of coffee, and then stamped heavily from the room.

        At dinner Will did not appear, and when at last the supper bell jangled in the hall and Fletcher strode in to find the boy's place still empty, the shadow upon his brow grew positively black. As they rose from the table there were brisk, light steps along

the hall, and Will entered hurriedly, warm and dusty after the day's hunt. Catching sight of his grandfather, he started nervously, and the boyish animation he had brought in from the fields faded quickly from his face, which took on a sly and dogged look.

        "Whar in the devil's name have you been, suh?" demanded Fletcher bluntly.

        The boy hesitated, seeking the inevitable defenses of the weak pitted against the strong. "I've been teaching my hounds to hunt rabbits," he replied, after a moment. "Zebbadee was with me."

        "So you were too sick to start for school this morning, eh?" pursued Fletcher, hurt and angry. "Only well enough to go traipsing through the bushes after a pack of brutes?"

        "I had a headache, but it got better. May I go up now to wash my hands?"

        For an instant Fletcher regarded him in a brooding silence; then, with that remorseless cruelty which is the strangest manifestation of wounded love, he loosened upon the boy's head all the violence of his smothered wrath.

        "You'll do nothing of the kind! I ain't done with you yet, and when I am I reckon you will know it. Mark my words, if you warn't such a girlish-looking chap I'd take my horsewhip to your shoulders in a jiffy. So this is the return I get, is it, for all my trouble with you since the day you were born! Tricks and lies are all the reward I'm to expect, I reckon. Well, you'll learn - once for all, now - that when you undertake to fool me it's a clear waste of time. I've found out whar you've been to-day,

and I know you've been sneaking across the county with that darn Blake!"

        The boy looked at him steadily, first with speechless terror, then with a cowed and sullen rage. The glare in Fletcher's eyes fascinated him, and he stood motionless on his spot of carpet as if he were held there in an invisible vise. Weakling as he was, he had been humoured too long to bear the lash submissively at last, and beneath the tumult of words that overwhelmed him he felt his anger flow like an infusion of courage in his veins. The greater share of love was still on his grandfather's side, and the knowledge of this lent a sullen defiance to his voice.

        "You bluster so I can't hear," he said, blinking fast to shut out the other's eyes. "If I did go with Christopher Blake, what's the harm in it? I only lied because you make such a fuss it gives me a headache."

        "It's the first fuss I ever made with you, I reckon," returned Fletcher, softening before the accusation. "If I ever fussed with you before, sonny, you may make mighty certain you deserved it."

        "You frighten me half to death when you rage so," persisted the boy, snatching craftily at his advantage.

        "There, there, we'll get it over," said Fletcher, quieting instantly. "I didn't mean to scare you that way, but the truth is it put me in a passion to hear of you mixing up with that scamp Blake. Jest keep clear of him and I'll ask nothing more of you. You may chase all your rabbits between here and kingdom come for aught I care, but if I ever see you

alongside of Christopher Blake again, I tell you, I'll lick you until you're black and blue. And now hurry up and git your supper and go to bed, for you start to school to-morrow morning at sunrise."

        Will flushed, and stood blinking his eyes in the lamplight.

        "I don't want to go to school, grandpa," he said persuasively.

        "That's a pity, sonny, because you've got to go whether you like it or not. Your Aunt Saidie has gone and packed your things, and I'll give you a month's pocket money to start with."

        "But I'd rather stay at home and study with Mr. Morrison. Then I could follow after the hounds in the afternoon and keep out in the fresh air, as the doctor said I must."

        "Now, now, we've had enough of this," said Fletcher decisively. "You'll do what I say, mind you, and you'll do it quick. No haggling over it, do you hear?"

        Will looked at him sullenly, nerved by that reckless anger which so often passes for pure daring.

        "If you make me go you'll be sorry, grandpa," he said, choking.

        Fletcher swallowed an uneasy laugh, strangled over it, and finally spat it out with a wad of tobacco.

        "Why, what blamed maggot have you got in your head, son?" he inquired, laying his heavy hand on the boy's shoulder. "You didn't use to hate school so, and, as sure as you're born, you'll find it first rate sport when you get back. It's this Blake business, that's what it is - he's gone and stuffed you plum full of notions. Look here, now, you

don't want to grow up to be a dunce like him, do you?"

        He had touched the raw at last, and Will broke out passionately in revolt, inflamed by a boyish admiration for his own bravado.

        "He's got a lot more sense than anybody about here," he cried, backing against the door and holding tightly to the handle; "and if he doesn't know that plaguey Greek it's because he says there isn't any use in it. Why, he can shoot a bird on the wing over his shoulder, and mount a horse at full gallop, and tell stories that make you creep all over. He's not a dunce, grandpa; he's my friend, and I like him!"

        The last words came in a sudden spurt, for, feeling his artificial courage ooze out of him, the boy had started in a run from the room. He had barely crossed the threshold, however, when Fletcher reached out with a strong grip and pulled him back, swinging him slowly round until the two stood face to face.

        "Now, here's one thing flat," said the man in a husky voice, "if I ever see or hear of you opening your mouth to that rascal again, I'll thrash you until you haven't a sound bone in your body. You'd better go up now and say your prayers."

        As he released his grasp, the boy struck out at him with a nerveless gesture and then shot like an arrow through the hall and out into the twilight. At the moment his terror of Fletcher was forgotten in the paroxysm of his anger. Short sobs broke from him as he ran, and presently his breath came in pants like those of an overdriven horse; but still, without slackening his pace, he sped on to the old

ice-pond and then wheeled past the turning into the sunken road. Not until he had reached the long gate before the Blake cottage did he stop short suddenly and stand, grasping his moist shirt collar, in an effort to quiet his convulsed breathing.

        The hounds greeted him with a single bay, and at the noise Cynthia came out upon the porch and then down into the gravelled path between the old rose-bushes.

        "What do you wish?" she demanded stiffly, standing severe and erect in her faded silk.

        "I must speak to Christopher - I must!" gasped the boy, breathing hard. "I am going away to- morrow, and this is my last chance."

        "Well, he's in the stable, I believe," replied Cynthia coolly. "If you want him, you must go there to look for him, and be sure not to make a noise when you pass the house." Then, as he darted away, her eyes followed him with a weary aversion.

        Will passed the kitchen and the woodpile and, turning into a little path that led from the well, came to the open door of the rudely built stable. A dim light fell in a square across the threshold, and looking inside he saw that a lantern was hanging from a nail above the nearest stall and that within the circle of its illumination Christopher was busily currying the old gray mare.

        At the boy's entrance he paused for an instant, glanced carelessly over the side of the stall, and then went on with his work.

        "Playing night-owl, eh?" he remarked indifferently. "There's no rubbing-down for you to do, I reckon."

        "There's a darn sight worse," returned the boy,

throwing out the oath with a conscious swagger as he braced himself against the ladder that ran up to the loft.

        His tone arrested Christopher's hand, and, lifting his head, the young man stood attentively regarding him, one arm lying upon the broad back of the old mare.

        "Why, what's up now?" he questioned with a smile. Some fine chaff, which he had brought down from the loft, still clung to his hair and clothes and darkened his upper lip like a mustache.

        "Grandpa's found it out and he's hopping," said the boy. "I always told you he would be, you know, and now it's come. If he ever catches me with you again he swears he'll give it to me like hell." He pressed tightly against the ladder and wagged his head defiantly. "But he needn't think he can bully me like that - not if I know it!"

        "Well, he mustn't catch you again," returned Christopher, not troubling to soften his scorn of such cheap heroics; "we must manage better next time. Did you think to remind him, by the way, that I once took the trouble to save your life?"

        "That's a fact, I didn't think of it. What would he have said, I wonder?"

        Christopher raised his eyebrows. "Knocked your front teeth out, perhaps. He's like that, isn't he?"

        "Oh, he's awfully fond of me, you know," protested the boy; "but it's his meddling ways that I can't stand. What business is it of his who my friends are? He hasn't got to take up with 'em, has he? Why, what he hates is for me to want to be with anybody but himself or Aunt Saidie. He'd

like to keep me dangling all day to his coat tails, but it's not fair, and I won't have it. I'll show him whether I'm to be kept a kid forever or not!"

        "There's spirit for you!" drawled Christopher with a laugh, as he applied the currycomb to the mare's flank.

        "You just wait till you hear the worst," returned the other, with evident pride in the thunderbolt about to be delivered. "He swears he's going to send me to school to-morrow at sunrise."

        "You don't say so?" ejaculated Christopher.

        "Oh, but he'll do it, too - the only way to get around him is to fall ill, and I can't work that to-morrow. I played the trick last week and he saw through it. I've got to go, that's certain; but I'm going to make him sorry enough before he's done. Why couldn't he let me keep on studying with Mr. Morrison, as the doctor said I ought to? What's the use of this blamed old Latin and Greek, anyway? Nobody about here knows them, and why should I set myself up for a precious numbskull of a scholar? I'd rather be a crack shot like you any day! I tell you one thing," he finished, sucking in his breath in a way that had annoyed Christopher from the first, "I've half a mind to run away or fall ill after I get there!"

        Christopher turned suddenly, slapped the mare on the flank, and came out of the stall, the currycomb still in his hand. His shirt sleeves were rolled above his elbows, and the muscles of his arms stood out like cords under the sunburned skin, which showed a paler bronze from the wrists up. He was flushed from leaning over, and his clothes smelled strongly of the stable.

        "If you do, come to me," he said lightly, "and I'll hide you in the barn till the storm blows over. It wouldn't last long, I reckon."

        "Bless you, no; when he's scared I can do anything with him. Why, he was as soft as mush after the horses ran away with me, though he'd threatened to thrash me if I touched the reins. Oh, I say it's a shame we never had that 'possum hunt!"

        Christopher turned down his shirt sleeves and brushed the chaff from his face.

        "What do you say about to-night?" he inquired, with something like a sneer. "We couldn't go far, of course, and we'd have to borrow Tom Spade's hounds - mine are tired out - but we might have a short run about midnight, get a 'possum or so, and be in our beds before daybreak. Shall we try it?"

        The boy wavered, struggling between his desire for the chase and his fear of Fletcher.

        "Of course, if you're afraid - " added Christopher slowly.

        "I'm not afraid," broke out Will angrily. "I'm not afraid and you know it. You be at the store by eleven, and I'll get out of the window and join you. Grandpa will never know, and if he does - well, I'll settle him!"

        "Then be quick about it," was Christopher's retort, and as the boy ran out into the darkness he followed him to the door and stood gazing moodily down upon the yellow circle that his lantern cast on the bare ground. A massive fatigue oppressed him, and his hands and feet had become like leaden weights. There was a heaviness, too, about his head, and his eyeballs burned as if he had looked

too long at a bright light. At the moment he felt like a man who, being bound upon a wheel, is whirled so rapidly around that he is dazed by the continuous revolutions. What did it all mean, anyway - the boy, Fletcher, himself, and the revenge which he now saw so clearly before him? Was it a great divine judgment or a great human cruelty?

        Question as he would, the wheel still turned, and he knew that for good or evil he was bound upon it until the end.

CHAPTER X
POWERS OF DARKNESS

        "Is it possible that what was so difficult yesterday

should have grown so easy to-day?" he asked himself, astonished. "Why have I never seen so clearly before? Why, until this evening, have I gone puling about my life as if such things as disgrace and poverty were sufficient to crush the strength out of a man? Let me put forth all my courage and nothing is impossible - not even the attainment of success nor the punishment of Fletcher. It is only necessary to begin at once - to hasten about one's task - and in a few short years it will be accomplished and done with. All will be as I wish, and I shall then be as happy as Tucker."

        Following this came the questions, How? When? Where shall I begin? - but he put them angrily aside and refilled his glass. A great good-humour possessed him, and, as he drank, all the unpleasant things of life - loss, unrest, heavy labour - vanished in the roseate glow that pervaded his thoughts.

        What came of it was not quite clear to him next day, and this caused the uneasiness that lasted for a week. He had a vague recollection that Tom Spade took the boy home and rolled him through the window, and that he himself went whistling to his bed with the glorious sensation that he was riding the crest of a big wave. With the morning came a severe headache and the ineffectual effort to remember just how far it had all gone, and then a sharp anxiety, which vanished when he saw Will pass on his way to school.

        "The boy was none the worse for it," Tom Spade told him later; "he had a drop too much, to be sure, but his legs were as steady as mine, an' he slept it off in an hour. He's a ticklish chap, Mr. Christopher,"

the storekeeper added after a moment, "an' I'd keep my hands from meddlin' with him, if I was you. That thing shan't happen agin at my place, an' it wouldn't have happened then if I'd been around at the beginnin'. You may tamper with yo' own salvation as much as you please - that's my gospel, but I'll be hanged if you've got a right to tamper with anybody else's."

        Christopher wheeled suddenly about and gave him a keen glance from under his lowered eyelids. For the first time he detected a lack of deference in Tom Spade's tone, and a suspicion shot through him that the words were meant to veil a reprimand.

        "Well, I reckon the boy's got as good a right to drink as I have," he retorted sneeringly, and a moment afterward went gaily whistling through the store. At the time he felt a certain pleasure in defying Tom's opinion - in setting himself so boldly in opposition to the conventional morality of his neighbours. The situation gave him several sharp breaths and that dizzy sense of insecurity in which his mood delighted. It had needed only the shade of disapproval expressed in the storekeeper's voice to lend a wonderful piquancy to his enjoyment - to cause him to toy in imagination with his hatred as a man does with his desire. Before Tom spoke he had caught himself almost regretting the affair - wondering, even, if his error were past retrieving - but with the first mere suggestion of outside criticism his humour underwent a startling change.

        Between Fletcher and himself the account was still open, and the way in which he meant to settle

it concerned himself alone - least of all did it concern Tom Spade.

        He was groping confusedly among these reflections when, one evening in early November, he went upstairs after a hasty supper to find Cynthia already awaiting him in his room. At his start of displeased surprise she came timidly forward and touched his arm.

        "Are you sick, Christopher? or has anything happened? You are so unlike yourself."

        He shook his head impatiently and her hand fell from his sleeve. It occurred to him all at once, with an aggrieved irritation, that of late his family had failed him in sympathy - that they had ceased to value the daily sacrifices he made. Almost with horror he found himself asking the next instant whether the simple bond of blood was worth all that he had given - worth his youth, his manhood, his ambition? Until this moment his course had seemed to him the one inevitable outcome of circumstances - the one appointed path for him to tread; but even as he put the question he saw in a sudden illumination that there might have been another way - that with the burden of the three women removed he might have struck out into the world and at least have kept his own head above water. With his next breath the horror of his thought held him speechless, and he turned away lest Cynthia should read his degradation in his eyes.

        "Happened! Why, what should have happened?" he inquired with attempted lightness. "Good Lord! After a day's work like mine you can hardly expect me to dance a hornpipe. Since sunrise I've done

a turn at fall ploughing, felled and chopped a tree, mended the pasture fence, brought the water for the washing, tied up some tobacco leaves, and looked after the cattle and the horses - and now you find fault because I haven't cut any extra capers!"

        "Not find fault, dear," she answered, and the hopeless courage in her face smote him to the heart. In a bitter revulsion of feeling he felt that he could not endure her suffering tenderness.

        "Find fault with you! Oh, Christopher! It is only that you have been so different of late, so brooding, and you seem to avoid us at every instant. Even mother has noticed it, and she imagines that you are in love."

        "In love!" he threw back his head with a loud laugh."Oh, I'm tired, Cynthia - dog-tired, that's the matter."

        "I know, I know," replied Cynthia, rubbing her eyes hard with the back of her hand. "And the worst is that there's no help for it - absolutely none. I think about it sometimes until I wonder that I don't go mad."

        He turned at this from the window through which he had been gazing and fixed upon her a perplexed and moody stare. The wistful patience in her face, like the look he had seen in the eyes of overworked farm animals, aroused in him a desire to prod her into actual revolt - into any decisive rebellion against fate. To accept life upon its own terms seemed to him, at the instant, pure cowardliness - the enforced submission of a weakened will; and he questioned almost angrily if the hereditary instincts were alive in her also? Did she, too, have her secret battles

and her silent capitulations? Or was her pious resignation, after all, only a new form of the old Blake malady - of that fatal apathy which seized them, like disease, when events demanded strenuous endeavour? Could the saintly fortitude he had once so envied be, when all was said, merely the outward expression of the inertia he himself had felt - of the impulse to drift with the tide, let it carry one where it would?

        "Well, I'm glad it's no worse," said Cynthia, with a sigh of relief, as she turned toward the door. "Since you are not sick, dear, things are not so bad as they might be. I'll let mother fancy you have what she calls 'a secret sentiment.' It amuses her, at any rate. And now I'm going to stir up some buckwheat cakes for your breakfast. We've got a jug of black molasses."

        "That's pleasant, at least," he returned, laughing; and then as she reached the door he went toward her and laid his hand awkwardly upon her shoulder. "Don't worry about me, Cynthia," he added; "there's a lot of work left in me yet, and a change for the better may come any day, you know. By next year the price of tobacco may shoot sky-high."

        Her face brightened and a flush smoothed out all the fine wrinkles on her brow, but with the pathetic shyness of a woman who has never been caressed she let his hand fall stiffly from her arm and went hurriedly from the room.

        For a few minutes Christopher stood looking abstractedly at the closed door. Then shaking his head, as if to rid himself of an accusing thought, he turned away and began rapidly to undress. He

had thrown off his coat, and was stooping to remove his boots, when a slight noise at the window startled him, and straightening himself instantly he awaited attentively a repetition of the sound. In a moment it came again, and hastily crossing the room and raising the sash, he looked out into the full moonlight and saw Will Fletcher standing in the gravelled path below. At the first glance surprise held him motionless, but as the boy waved to him he responded to the signal, and, catching up his coat from the bed, ran down the staircase and out into the yard.

        "What in the devil's name - " he exclaimed, aghast.

        Will was trembling from exhaustion, and his face glimmered like a pallid blotch under the shadow of the aspen. When the turkeys stirred on an overhanging bough above him he started nervously and sucked in his breath with a hissing sound. He was run to death; this Christopher saw at the first anxious look.

        "Get me something to eat," said the boy, "I'm half starved - but bring it to the barn, for I'm too dead tired to stand a moment. Yes, I ran away, of course," he finished irritably. "Do I look as if I'd come in grandpa's carriage?"

        With a last spurt of energy he disappeared into the shadows behind the house, and Christopher going into the kitchen, began searching the tin safe for the chance remains of supper. On the table was the bowl of buckwheat which Cynthia had been preparing when she was called away by some imperious demand of her mother's, and near it he saw the open prayer-book from which she had been reading.

From the adjoining room he heard Tucker's voice - those rich, pleasant tones that translated into sound the courageous manliness of the old soldier's face - and for an instant he yearned toward the cheerful group sitting in the firelight beyond the whitewashed wall - toward the blind woman in her old oak chair, listening to the evening chapter from the Scriptures. Then the feeling passed as quickly as it had come, and securing a plate of bread and a dried ham-bone, he filled a glass with fresh milk, and, picking up his lantern, went out of doors and along the little straggling path to the barn.

        The yard was frosted over with moonlight, but when he reached the rude building where the farm implements and cattle fodder were sheltered he saw that it was quite dark inside, only a few scattered moonbeams crawling through the narrow doorway. To his first call there was no answer, and it was only after he had lighted his lantern and swung it round in the darkness that he discovered Will lying fast asleep upon a pile of straw.

        As the light struck him full in the face the boy opened his eyes and sprang up.

        "Why, it's you," he said in a relieved voice. "I thought it was grandpa. If he comes you've got to keep him out, you know!"

        He spoke in an excited whisper, and his eyes plunged beyond the entrance with a look of pitiable and abject terror. Once or twice he shivered as if from cold, and then, turning away, cowered into the pile of straw in search of warmth.

        For a time Christopher stood gazing uneasily down upon him. "Look here, man, this can't keep up,"

he said. "You'd better go straight home, that's my opinion, and get into a decent bed."

        Will started up again. "I won't see him! I won't!" he cried angrily. "If you bring him here I'll get up and hide. I won't see him! Why, he almost killed me after that 'possum hunt we had, and if he found this out so soon he'd kill me outright. There was an awful rumpus at school. They wrote him and he said he was coming, so I ran away. It was all his fault, too; he had no business to send me back again when he knew how I hated it. I told him he'd be sorry."

        "Well, he shan't get in here to-night," returned Christopher soothingly. "I'll keep him out with a shotgun, bless him, if he shows his face. Come, now, sit up and eat a bit, or there won't be any fight left in us."

        Will took the food obediently, but before it touched his lips the hand in which he held it dropped limply to the straw.

        "I can't eat," he complained, with a gesture of disgust. "I'm too sick - I've been sick for days. It was all grandpa's doing, too. When I heard he was coming I went out and got soaking wet, and then slept in my clothes all night. I knew he'd never make a fuss if I could only get ill enough, but the next morning I felt all right, so I came away."

        Kneeling upon the floor, Christopher held the glass to his lips, gently forcing him to drink a few swallows. Then dipping his handkerchief in the cattle-trough outside, he bathed the boy's face and hands, and, loosening his clothes, made him as comfortable as he could. "This won't do, you know," he urged

presently, alarmed by Will's difficult breathing. "You are in for a jolly little spell, and I must get you home. Your grandfather will never bother you while you're sick."

        At the words the boy clung to him deliriously, Breaking into frightened whimpers such as a child makes in the dark. "I won't go back! I won't go back!" he repeated wildly;" he'll never believe I'm ill, and I won't go back!"

        "All right; that settles it. Lie quiet and I'll fetch you some bedding from my room. Then I'll fix you a pallet out here, and we'll put up as best we can till morning."

        "Don't stay; don't stay," pleaded Will, as the other, leaving his lantern on the floor, ran out into the moonlight.

        Returning in a quarter of an hour, he threw a small feather-bed down upon the straw and settled the boy comfortably upon it. Then he covered him with blankets, and, after closing the door, came back and stood watching for him to fall asleep. A slight draft blew from the boarded window, and, taking off his coat, he hung it carefully across the cracks, shading the lantern with his hand that its light might not flash in the sleeper's face.

        At his step Will gave a stifled moan and looked up in terror.

        "I thought you'd left me. Don't go," he begged, stretching out his hand until it grasped the other's. With the hot, nerveless clutch upon him, Christopher was conscious of a quick repulsion, and he remembered the sensation he had felt as a boy when he had once suddenly brought his palm down on a little green

snake that was basking in the sunshine on an old log. Yet he did not shake the hand off, and when presently the blanket slipped from Will's shoulders he stooped and replaced it with a strange gentleness. The disgust he felt was so evenly mingled with compassion that, as he stood there, he could not divide the one emotion from the other. He hated the boy's touch, and yet, almost in spite of himself, he suffered it.

        "Well, I'm not going, so you needn't let that worry you," he replied. "I'll stretch myself alongside of you in the straw, and if you happen to want me, just yell out, you know."

        The weak fingers closed tightly about his wrist.

        "You promise?" asked the boy.

        "Oh, I promise," answered the other, raising the lantern for a last look before he blew it out.

        By early daybreak Will's condition was still more alarming, and leaving him in a feverish stupor upon the pallet, Christopher set out hurriedly shortly after sunrise to carry news of the boy's whereabouts to Fletcher.

        It was a clear, cold morning, and the old brick house, set midway of the autumn fields, appeared, as he approached it, to reflect the golden light that filled the east. Never had the place seemed to him more desirable than it did as he went slowly toward it along the desolate November roads. The somber colours of the landscape, the bared majesty of the old oaks where a few leaves still clung to the topmost boughs, the deserted garden filled with wan specters of summer flowers, were all in peculiar harmony with his own mood as with the stern gray walls

wrapped in naked creepers. That peculiar sense of ownership was strongly with him as he ascended the broad steps and lifted the old brass knocker, which still bore the Blake coat of arms.

        To his astonishment the door opened instantly and Fletcher himself appeared upon the threshold. At sight of Christopher he fell back as if from a blow in the chest, ripping out an oath with a big downward gesture of his closed fist.

        "So you are mixed up in it, are you! Whar's the boy?" From the dusk of the hall his face shone dead white about the eyes.

        "If you want to get anything out of me you'd better curb your tongue, Bill Fletcher," replied Christopher coolly, feeling an animal instinct to prolong the torture. "If you think it's any satisfaction to me to have your young idiot thrown on my hands you were never more mistaken in your life. I've been up half the night with him, and the sooner you take him away the better I'll like it."

        "Oh, you leave him to me and I'll settle him," responded Fletcher, reaching for his hat. "Jest show me whar he is and I'll git even with him befo' sundown. As for you, young man, I'll have the sheriff after you yit."

        "In the meantime, you'd better have the doctor. The boy's ill, I tell you. He came to me last evening, run to death and with a high fever. He slept in the barn, and this morning he is decidedly worse. If you come, bring Doctor Cairn with you, and I warn you now you've got to use a lot of caution. Your grandson is mortally afraid of you, and he threatens to run away if I let you know where he

is. He wants me to sit at the door with a shotgun and keep you off."

        He delivered his blows straight out from the shoulder, lingering over each separate word that he might enjoy to the full its stupendous effect.

        "This is your doing," repeated Fletcher hoarsely; "it's your doing, every blamed bit of it."

        Christopher laughed shortly. "Well, I'm through with my errand," he said, moving toward the steps and pausing with one hand on a great white column. "The sooner you get him out of my barn the better riddance it will be. There's one thing certain, though, and that is that you don't lay eyes on him without the doctor. He's downright ill, on my oath."

        "Oh, it's the same old trick, and I see through it," exclaimed Fletcher furiously. "It's pure shamming."

        "All the same, I've got my gun on hand, and you don't go into that barn alone." He hung for an instant upon the topmost step, then descended hurriedly and walked rapidly back along the broad white walk. It would be an hour, at least, before Fletcher could follow him with Doctor Cairn, and after he had returned to the barn and given Will a glass of new milk he fed and watered the horses and did the numberless small tasks about the house. He was at the woodpile, chopping some lightwood splinters for Cynthia, when the sound of wheels reached him, and in a little while more the head of Fletcher's mare appeared around the porch. Doctor Cairn, a frousy, white-bearded old man, crippled from rheumatism, held out his hand to Christopher

as he descended with some difficulty between the wheels of the buggy.

        Christopher motioned to the barn, and then, taking the reins, fastened the horse to the branch of a young ailanthus tree which grew near the woodpile. As he watched the figures of the two men pass along the little path between the fringes of dead yarrow he drew an uneasy breath and dug his boot into the rotting mould upon the ground. The barn door opened and closed; there was a short silence, and then a sudden despairing cry as of a rabbit caught in the jaws of a hound. When he heard it he turned impulsively from the horse's head and went quickly along the path the men had taken. There was no definite intention in his mind, but as he reached the barn door it shot open and Fletcher put out a white face.

        "The Doctor wants you, Mr. Christopher," he cried; "Will has gone clean mad!"

        Without a word, Christopher pushed by him and went into the great dusky room, where the boy was struggling like a madman to loosen the doctor's grasp. He was conscious at the moment that the air was filled with fine chaff and that he sucked it in when he breathed.

        At his entrance Will lay quiet for a moment and looked at him with dazed, questioning eyes.

        "Keep them out, Christopher!" he cried, in anguish.

        Christopher crossed the room and laid his hand with a protecting gesture on the boy's head.

        "Why, to be sure I will," he said heartily; "the devil himself won't dare to touch you when I am by."

BOOK III
THE REVENGE

THE REVENGE

CHAPTER I
IN WHICH TOBACCO IS HERO

        "Jim and Jacob are both over thar," she said; "an' a few others, for the matter of that, who have been helpin' us press new cider an' drinkin' the old. I'm sure I don't see why they want to lounge out thar in all that smoke, but thar's no accountin' for the taste of a man that ever I heard tell of - an' I reckon they kin fancy pretty easy that they are settin' plum in the bowl of a pipe. It beats me, though, that it do. Why, one mouthful of it is enough to start me coughin' for a week, an' those men thar jest swallow it down for pure pleasure."

        Clean, kindly, hospitable, she wandered garrulously on, remembering at intervals to press the young man to "come inside an' try the cakes an' cider."

        "No; I'll look them up out there," said Christopher, resisting the invitation to enter. "I want to get a pair of horseshoes from Jim; the gray mare cast hers yesterday, and Dick Boxley is laid up with a sprained arm. Oh, no, thanks; I must be going back." With a friendly nod he turned from the steps and went rapidly along the path which led to the distant barn.

        As Mrs. Weatherby had said, the place was like the bowl of a pipe, and it was a moment before Christopher discovered the little group gathered about the doorway, where a shutter hung loosely on wooden hinges.

        The ancient custom of curing tobacco with open fires, which had persisted in Virginia since the days of the early settlers, was still commonly in use; and it is possible that had one of Christopher's colonial ancestors appeared at the moment in Jacob Weatherby's log barn it would have been difficult to convince him that between his death and his resurrection there was a lapse of more than two hundred years. He would have found the same square, pen-like structure, built of straight logs carefully notched at the corners; the same tier-poles rising at intervals of three feet to the roof; the same hewn plates to support the rafters; the same "daubing" of the chinks with red clay; and the same crude door cut in the south wall. From the roof the tobacco hung in a fantastic decoration, shading from dull green to deep bronze, and appearing,

when viewed from the ground below, to resemble a numberless array of small furled flags. On the hard earth floor there were three parallel rows of "unseasoned" logs which burned slowly day and night, filling the barn with gray smoke and the pungent odour of the curing tobacco.

        "It takes a heap of lookin' arter, an' no mistake," old Jacob was remarking, as he surveyed the fine crop with the bland and easy gaze of ownership. "Why, in a little while them top leaves thar will be like tinder, an' the first floatin' spark will set it all afire. That's the way Sol Peterkin lost half a crop last year, an' it's the way Dick Moss lost his whole one the year before." At Christopher's entrance he paused and turned his pleasant, ruddy face from the fresh logs which he had been watching. "So you want to have a look at my tobaccy, too?" he added, with the healthful zest of a child. "Well, it's worth seein', if I do say so; thar hasn't been sech leaves raised in this county within the memory of man."

        "That's so," said Christopher, with an appreciative glance. "I'm looking for Jim, but he's keeping up the fires, isn't he?" Then he turned quickly, for Tom Spade, who with young Matthew Field had been critically weighing the promise of Jacob's crop, broke out suddenly into a boisterous laugh.

        "Why, I declar', Mr. Christopher, if you ain't lost yo' shadow!" he exclaimed.

        Christopher regarded him blankly for a moment, and then joined lightly in the general mirth. "Oh, you mean Will Fletcher," he returned. "There was a pretty girl in the road as we came up, and I

couldn't get him a step beyond her. Heaven knows what's become of him by now!"

        "I bet my right hand that was Molly Peterkin," said Tom. "If anybody in these parts begins to talk about 'a pretty gal,' you may be sartain he's meanin' that yaller-headed limb of Satan. Why, I stopped my Jinnie goin' with her a year ago. Sech women, I said to her, are fit for nobody but men to keep company with."

        "That's so; that's so," agreed old Jacob, in a charitable tone; "seein' as men have most likely made 'em what they are, an' oughtn't to be ashamed of thar own handiwork."

        "Now, when it comes to yaller hair an' blue eyes," put in Matthew Field, "she kin hold her own agin any wedded wife that ever made a man regret the day of his birth. Many's the time of late I've gone a good half-mile to git out of that gal's way, jest as I used to cut round old Fletcher's pasture when I was a boy to keep from passin' by his red-heart cherry-tree that overhung the road. Well, well, they do say that her young man, Fred Turner, went back on her, an' threw her on her father's hands two days befo' the weddin'."

        "It was hard on Sol, now you come to think of it," said Tom. "He told me himself that he tried to git the three who ought to marry her to draw straws for the one who was to be the happy man, but they all backed out an' left her high an' dry an' as pretty as a peach. Fred Turner would have taken his chance, he said, like an honest man, an' he was terrible down in the mouth when I saw him, for he was near daft over the gal."

        "Well, he was right," admitted Matthew, after reflection. "Why, the gal sins so free an' easy you might almost fancy her a man."

        He drew back, coughing, for Jim came in with a long green log and laid it on the smouldering fire, which glowed crimson under the heavy smoke.

        "Here's Sol," said the young man, settling the log with his foot. "I told him you were on your way to the house, pa, but he said he had only a minute, so he came out here."

        "Oh, I've jest been to borrow some Jamaica ginger from Mrs. Weatherby," explained Sol Peterkin, carefully closing the shutter after his entrance. "My wife's took so bad that I'm beginnin' to fear she'll turn out as po' a bargain as the last. It's my luck - I always knew I was ill-fated - but, Lord a-mercy, how's a man goin' to tell the state of a woman's innards from the way she looks on top? All the huggin' in the world won't make her wink an eyelash, an' then there'll crop out heart disease or dropsy befo' the year is up. When I think of the trouble I had pickin' that thar woman it makes me downright sick. It ain't much matter about the colour or the shape, I said - a freckled face an' a scrawny waist I kin stand - only let it be the quality that wears. If you believe it, suh, I chose the very ugliest I could find, thinkin' that the Lord might be mo' willin' to overlook her - an' now this is what's come of it. She's my fourth, too, an' I'll begin to be a joke when I go out lookin' for a fifth. Naw, suh; if Mary dies, pure shame will keep me a widower to my death."

        "Thar ain't but one thing sartain about marriage,

in my mind," commented Matthew Field, "an' that is that it gits most of its colour from the distance that comes between. The more your mouth waters for a woman, the likelier 'tis that 'tain't the woman for you - that's my way of thinkin'. The woman a man don't git somehow is always the woman he ought to have had. It's a curious, mixed-up business, however you look at it."

        "That's so," said Tom Spade; "I always noticed it. The woman who is your wife may be a bouncin' beauty, an' the woman who ain't may be as ugly as sin, but you'd go twice as far to kiss her all the same. Thar is always a sight more spice about the woman who ain't."

        "Jest look at Eliza, now," pursued Matthew, wrapped in the thought of his own domestic infelicities. "What I could never understand about Eliza was that John Sales went clean to the dogs because he couldn't git her. To think of sech a thing happenin', jest as if I was to blame, when if I'd only known it I could hev turned about an' taken her sister Lizzie. Thar were five of 'em in all, an' I settled on Eliza, as it was, with my eyes blindfold. Poor John - poor John! It was sech a terrible waste of wantin'."

        "Well, it's a thing to stiddy about," said old Jacob, with a sigh. "They tell me now that that po' young gal of Bill Fletcher's has found it a thorny bed, to be sho'. Her letters are all bright an' pleasant enough, they say, filled with fine clothes an' the names of strange places, but a gentleman who met her somewhar over thar wrote Fletcher that her husband used her like a dumb brute."

        Christopher started and looked up inquiringly.

        "Have you heard anything about that, Jim?" he asked in a queer voice.

        "Nothin' more. Fletcher told me he had written to her to come home, but she answered that she would stick to Wyndham for better or for worse. It's a great pity - the marriage promised so well, too."

        "Oh, the gal's got a big heart; I could tell it from her eyes," said old Jacob. "When you see those dark, solemn eyes, lookin' out of a pale, peaked face, it means thar's a heart behind 'em, an' a heart that bodes trouble some day, whether it be in man or woman."

        Christopher passed his hand across his brow and stood staring vacantly at the smouldering logs. He could not tell whether the news saddened or rejoiced him, but, at least, it brought Maria's image vividly before his eyes. The spell of her presence was over him again, and he felt, as he had felt on that last evening, the mysterious attraction of her womanhood. So intense was the visionary appeal that it had for the moment almost the effect of hallucination; it was as if she still entreated him across all the distance. The brooding habit of his mind had undoubtedly done much to conserve his emotion, as had the rural isolation in which he lived. In a city life the four years would probably have blotted out her memory; but where comparison was impossible, and lighter distractions almost unheard of, what chance was there for him to forget the single passionate experience he had known? Among his primitive neighbours Maria had flitted for a time

like a bewildering vision; then the great distant world had caught her up into its brightness, and the desolate waste country was become the guardian of the impression she had left.

        "If thar's a man who has had bad luck with his children, it's Bill Fletcher," old Jacob was saying thoughtfully. "He's been a hard man an' a mean one, too, an' when he couldn't beg or borrow it's my opinion that he never hesitated to put forth his hand an' steal. Thar's a powerful lot of judgment in dumb happenin's, an' when you see a family waste out an' run to seed like that it usually means that the good Lord is havin' His way about matters. It takes a mighty sharp eye to tell the difference between judgment an' misfortune, an' I've seen enough in this world to know that, no matter how skilfully you twist up good an' evil, God Almighty may be a long time in the unravelling, but He'll straighten 'em out at last. Now as to Bill Fletcher, his sins got in the bone an' they're workin' out in the blood. Look at his son Bill - didn't he come out of the army to drink himself to death? Then his granddaughter Maria has gone an' mismarried a somebody, an' this boy that he'd set his heart on is goin' to the devil so precious fast that he ain't got time to look behind him."

        "Oh, he's young yet," suggested Tom Spade, solemnly wagging his head, "an' Fletcher says, you know, that he's all right so long as he keeps clear of Mr. Christopher. It's Mr. Christopher, he swears, that's been the ruin of him."

        Christopher met this with a sneer.

        "Why does he let him dog my footsteps, then?"

he inquired with a laugh. "I never go to the Hall, and yet he's always after me."

        "Bless you, suh, it ain't any question of lettin' - an' thar never has been sence the boy first put on breeches. Why, when I refused to sell him whisky at my sto', what did he do but begin smugglin' it out from town! Fletcher found it out an' blew him sky-high, but in less than a month it was all goin' on agin."

        "An' the funny part is," said Jim Weatherby, "that you can't dislike Will Fletcher, however much you try. He's a kind-hearted, jolly fellow, in spite of the devil."

        "Or in spite of Mr. Christopher," added Tom, with a guffaw.

        Frowning heavily, Christopher turned toward the door.

        "Oh, you ask Will Fletcher who is his best friend," he said, "and let me hear his answer."

        With an abrupt nod to Jacob, he went out of the tobacco barn and along the little path to the road. He had barely reached the gate, however when Jim Weatherby ran after him with the horseshoes, and offered eagerly to come over in the morning and see that the gray mare was properly shod.

        "I'm handy at that kind of thing, you know," he explained, with a blush.

        "Well, if you don't mind, I wish you would come," Christopher replied, "but to save my life I can't see why you are so ready with other people's jobs."

        Then, taking the horseshoes, he opened the gate and started rapidly toward home. His mind was still absorbed by old Jacob's news, and upon reaching

the house he was about to pass up to his room, when Cynthia called him from the little platform beyond the back door, and going out, he found her standing pale and tearful on the kitchen threshold. Looking beyond her, he saw that Lila and Tucker were in the room, and from the intense and resolute expression in the younger sister's face he judged that she was the central figure in what appeared to be a disturbing scene.

        "Christopher, you can't imagine what has happened," Cynthia began in her beautiful, tragic voice. "Lila went to church yesterday - with whom, do you suppose?"

        Christopher thought for a moment. "Not with Bill Fletcher?" he gave out at last.

        "Come, come, now, it's a long ways better than that, you'll admit, Cynthia," broke in Tucker, with a peaceful intention. "I can't help reminding you, my dear, to be thankful that it wasn't so unlikely a person as Bill Fletcher."

        With a decisive gesture such as he had never believed her capable of, Lila came up to Christopher and stood facing him with beaming eyes. He had never before seen her so lovely, and he realised at the instant that it was this she had always needed to complete her beauty. From something merely white and warm and delicate she had become suddenly as radiant as a flame.

        "I went with Jim Weatherby, Christopher," she said slowly, "and I'm not ashamed of it."

        The admission wrung a short groan from Cynthia, who stood twisting her gingham apron tightly about her fingers.

        "Oh, Lila, who was his grandfather?" she cried. "Well, there's one thing certain, she doesn't want to marry his grandfather," put in Tucker, undaunted by the failure of his former attempts at peace-making. "Not that I have anything against the old chap, for that matter; he was an honest, well-behaved old body, and used to mend my boots for me up to the day of his death. Jim gets his handy ways from him, I reckon."

        Cynthia turned upon him angrily.

        "Uncle Tucker, you will drive me mad," she exclaimed, the tears starting to her lashes. "It does seem to me that you, at least, might show some consideration for the family name. It's all we've left."

        "And it's a good enough relic in its way," returned Tucker amicably, "though if you are going to make a business of sacrificing yourself, for heaven's sake let it be for something bigger than a relic. A live neighbour is a much better thing to make sacrifices for than a dead grandfather."

        "I don't care one bit what his grandfather was or whether he ever had any or not!" cried Lila, in an outburst of indignation; "and more than that, I don't care what mine was, either. I am going to marry him - I am - I am! Don't look at me like that, Cynthia. Do you want to spoil my whole life?"

        Cynthia threw out her hands with a despairing grasp of the air, as if she were reaching for the broken remnants of the family pride. "To marry a Weatherby!" she gasped. "Oh, mother! mother! Lila, is it possible that you can be so selfish?"

        But Lila had won her freedom too dearly to surrender it to an appeal.

        "I want to be selfish," she said stubbornly. "I have never been selfish in my life, and I want to see what it feels like. Oh, you are cruel, all of you, and you will break my heart."

        Christopher's face paled and grew stern.

        "We must all think of mother's wishes, Lila," he said gravely.

        For the first time the girl lost her high fortitude, and a babyish quiver shook her lips. Her glance wavered and fell, and with a pathetic gesture she turned from Christopher to Cynthia and from Cynthia to Tucker.

        "Oh, you can't understand, Christopher!" she cried; "you have never been in love, nor has Cynthia. None of you can understand but Uncle Tucker!"

        She ran to him sobbing, and he, steadying himself on a single crutch, folded his arm about her.

        "I understand, child, thank God," he said softly.

CHAPTER II
BETWEEN CHRISTOPHER AND WILL

        "I say, Chris, take a turn off and come down to Tom Spade's," he urged.

        Christopher, who was descending from the loft with an armful of straw, paused midway of the ladder and regarded his visitor with perceptible hesitation.

        "I can't this evening," he answered; "the light is almost gone, and I've a good deal to get through with after dark. I'll manage better to-morrow, if I can. By the way, why didn't you show up at Weatherby's?"

        Will came in and sat down on the edge of a big wooden box which contained the harness. In the four years he had changed but little in appearance, though his slim figure had shot up rapidly in height. His chestnut hair grew in high peaks from his temples and swept in a single lock above his small, sparkling eyes, which held an expression of intelligent animation. On the whole, it was not an unpleasing face, despite the tremulous droop of the mouth, already darkened by the faint beginning of a brown mustache.

        "Oh, Molly Peterkin stopped me in the road," he replied readily. "I'd caught her eye once or twice before, but this was the first chance we'd had to speak. I tell you she's a peach, Christopher."

        Christopher came down from the ladder and spread the straw evenly in the horses' stalls.

        "So they say," he responded; "but I haven't much of an eye for women, you know. Now, when it comes to judging a leaf of tobacco, I'm a match for any man."

        "Well, one can't be everything," remarked Will consolingly. He snatched at a piece of straw that had fallen on the lowest rung of the ladder and began idly chewing it. "As for me, I know a blamed sight more about women than I do about tobacco," he added, with a swagger.

        Christopher glanced up, and at sight of the boyish figure burst into a hearty laugh.

        "Oh, you're a jolly old sport, I know, and to think that Tom Spade has been accusing me of leading you astray! Why, you are already twice the man that I am."

        "Pshaw! That's just grandpa's chatter! The old man rails at me day and night about you until it's a mortal wonder he doesn't drive me to the dogs outright. I'd like to see another fellow that would put up with it for a week. Captain Morrison told him, you know, that I hadn't done a peg of study for a year, and it brought on a scene that almost shook the roof. Now he swears I'm to go to the university next fall or hang."

        "Well, I'd go, by all means."

        "What under heaven could I do there? All

those confounded languages Morrison poured into my head haven't left so much as a single letter of the alphabet. Ad nauseam is all I learned of Latin. I tell you I'd rather be a storekeeper any time than a scholar - books make me sick all over - and, when it comes to that, I don't believe I know much more to-day than you do."

        A smile crossed Christopher's face, leaving it very grim. The words recalled to him his own earlier ambition - that of the gentlemanly scholar of the old order - and there flickered before his eyes the visionary library, suffused with firelight, and the translation of the "Iliad " he had meant to finish.

        "I always told you it wasn't worth anything," he said roughly. "Not worth so much as Molly Peterkin's little finger. Do you think she'd love you any better if you could spurt Greek?"

        Will broke into a pleased laugh, his mind dwelling upon the fancy the other had conjured up so skilfully.

        "Did you ever see such lips in your life?" he inquired.

        Christopher shook his head. "I haven't noticed them, but Sol's have a way of sticking in my memory."

        "Oh, you brute! It's a shame that she should have such a father. He's about the worst I ever met."

        "Some think the shame is on the other side, you know."

        "That's a lie - she told me so. Fred Turner started the whole thing because she refused to marry him at the last moment. She found out suddenly that she wasn't in love with him. Girls are like that, you see. Why, Maria - "

        Christopher looked up quickly.

        "I've nothing to do with your sister," he observed.

        "I know that; but it's true, all the same. Maria couldn't tell her own mind any better. Why, one day she was declaring that she was over head and ears in love with Jack, and the next she was wringing her hands and begging him to go away."

        "What are you going to do down at the store?" asked Christopher abruptly.

        "Oh, nothing in particular - just lounge, I suppose; there's never anything to do. By the way, can't we have a hunt to-morrow?"

        "I'll see about it. Look here, is your grandfather any worse than usual? He stormed at me like mad yesterday because I wouldn't turn my team of oxen out of the road."

        "It's like blasting rock to get a decent word out of him. The only time he's been good-humoured for four years was the week we were away together. He offered me five thousand dollars down if I'd never speak to you again."

        "You don't say so!" exclaimed Christopher. He bent his head and stood looking thoughtfully at the matted straw under foot. "Well, you had a chance to turn a pretty penny," he said, in a tone of gentle raillery.

        "Oh, hang it! What do you mean?" demanded Will. "Of course, I wasn't going back on you like that just to please grandpa. I'd have been a confounded sneak if I had!"

        "You're a jolly good chap and no mistake! But the old man would have been pleased, I reckon?"

        Will grinned.

        "You bet he would! I could twist him round my finger but for you, Aunt Saidie says."

        "It will be all the same in the end, though. The whole thing will come to you some day."

        "Oh, yes. Maria got her share, and Wyndham has made ducks and drakes of it."

        "Your grandfather's aging, too, isn't he?"

        "Rather," returned Will, with a curious mixture of amiable lightness and cool brutality. "He's gone off at least twenty years since that time I had pneumonia in your barn. That wrecked him, Aunt Saidie says, and all because he knew he'd have to put up with you when the doctor told him to let me have my way. His temper gets worse, too, all the time. I declare, he sometimes makes me wish he were dead and buried."

        "Oh, he'll live long enough yet, never fear - those wiry, cross-grained people are as tough as lightwood knots. It's a pity, though, he wants to bully you like that - it would kill me in a day."

        A flush mounted to Will's forehead. "I knew you'd think so," he said, "and it's what I tell him all the time. He's got no business meddling with me so much, and I won't stand it."

        "He ought to get a dog," suggested Christopher indifferently.

        "Well, I'm not a dog, and I'll make him understand it yet. Oh, you think I'm an awful milksop, of course, but I'll show you otherwise some day. I'd like to know if you could have done any better in my place?"

        "Done! Why, I shouldn't have been in your place long, that's all."

        "I shan't, either, for that matter; but I've got to humour him a little, you see, because he holds the purse-strings."

        "He'd never go so far as to kick you out, would he?"

        "Well, hardly. I'm all he has, you know. He doesn't like Maria because of her fine airs, much as he thinks of education. I've got to be a gentleman, he says; but as for him, he wouldn't give up one of his vulgar habits to save anybody's soul. His trouble with Maria all came of her reproving him for drinking out of his saucer. Now, I don't mind that kind of thing so much, but Maria used to say she'd rather have him steal, any day, than gulp his coffee. Why are you laughing so?"

        "Oh, nothing. Are you going to Tom's now? I've got to work."

        Will slid down from the big box and sauntered toward the door, pausing on the little wooden step to light a cigarette.

        "Drop in if you get a chance," he threw back over his shoulder, with a puff of smoke.

        In a few moments Christopher finished his work, and, coming outside, closed the stable door. Then he walked a few paces along the little path, stopping from time to time to gaze across the darkening landscape. A light mist was wreathed about the tops of the old lilac-bushes, where it glimmered so indistinctly that it seemed as if one might dispel it by a breath; and farther away the soft evening colours had settled over the great fields, beyond which a clear yellow line was just visible above the distant woods. The wind was sharp with an edge of

frost, and as it blew into his face he raised his head and drank long, invigorating drafts. From the cattle-pen hard by he smelled the fresh breath of the cows, and around him were those other odours, vague, familiar, pleasant, which are loosened at twilight in the open country.

        The time had been when the mere physical contact with the air would have filled him with a quiet satisfaction, but during the last four years he had lost gradually his sensitiveness to external things - to the changes of the seasons as to the beauties of an autumn sunrise. A clear morning had ceased to arouse in him the old buoyant energy, and he had lost the zest of muscular exertion which had done so much to sweeten his labour in the fields. It was as if a clog fettered his simplest no less than his greatest emotion; and his enjoyment of nature had grown dull and spiritless, like his affection for his family. With his sisters he was aware that a curious constraint had become apparent, and it was no longer possible for him to meet his mother with the gay deference she still exacted. There were times, even, when he grew almost suspicious of Cynthia's patience, and at such moments his irritation was manifested in a sullen reserve. To himself he could give no explanation of his state of mind; he knew merely that he retreated day by day farther into the shadow of his loneliness, and that, while in his heart he still craved human sympathy, an expression of it even from those he loved was, above all, the thing he most bitterly resented.

        A light flashed in the kitchen, and he went on slowly toward the house. As he reached the back

porch he saw that Lila was sitting at the kitchen window looking wearily out into the dusk. The firelight scintillated in her eyes, and as she turned quickly at a sound within the room he noticed with a pang that the sparkles were caused by teardrops on her lashes. His heart quickened at the sight of her drooping figure, and an impulse seized him to go in and comfort her at any cost. Then his severe constraint laid an icy hold upon him, and he hesitated with his hand upon the door.

        "If I go in and speak to her, what is there for me to say?" he thought, overcome by his horror of any uncontrolled emotion. "We will merely go over the old complaints, the endless explanations. She will probably weep like a child, and I shall feel a brute when I look on and keep silent. In the first place, if I speak to her, what is there for me to say? If I simply beg her to stop crying, or if I rush in and urge her to marry Jim Weatherby to-morrow, what good can come of either course? She doesn't wait for my consent to the marriage, for she is as old as I am, and knows her own heart much better than I know mine. It is true that she is too beautiful to waste away like this, but how can I prevent it, or what is there for me to do?"

        Again came the impulse to go in and fold her in his arms, but before he had taken the first step he yielded, as always, to his strange reserve, and he realised that if he entered it would be but to assume his customary unconcern, from the shelter of which he would probably make a few commonplace remarks on trivial subjects. The emotional situation would be ignored by them all, he knew; they would treat

it absolutely as if it had no existence, as if its voice was not speaking to them in the silence, and they would break their bread and drink their coffee in apparent unconsciousness that supper was not the single thing that engrossed their thoughts. And all the time they would be face to face with the knowledge that they had demanded that Lila should sacrifice her life.

        Presently Cynthia came out and called him, and he went in carelessly and sat down at the table. Lila left the window and slipped into her place, and when Tucker joined them she cut up his food as usual and prepared his coffee.

        "Uncle Tucker's cup has no handle, Cynthia," she said with concern. "Let me take this one and give him another."

        "Well, I never!" exclaimed Cynthia, bending over to examine the break with her near-sighted squint. "We'll soon have to begin using Aunt Susannah's set, if this keeps up. Uncle Boaz, you've broken another cup to-day."

        Her tone was sharp with irritation, and the fine wrinkles caused by ceaseless small worries appeared instantly between her eyebrows. Christopher, watching her, remembered that she had worn the same expression during the scene with Lila, and it annoyed him unspeakably that she should be able to descend so readily, and with equal energy, upon so insignificant a grievance as a bit of broken china.

        Uncle Boaz hobbled round the table and peered contemptuously at the cup which Lila held.

        "Dar warn' no use bruckin' dat ar one," he observed, "'caze 'twuz bruck a'ready."

        "Oh, there won't be a piece left presently," pursued Cynthia indignantly; and Christopher felt suddenly that there was something contemptible in the passion she expended upon trifles. He wondered if Tucker noticed how horribly petty it all was - to lament a broken cup when the tears were hardly dried on Lila's cheeks. Finishing hurriedly, he pushed back his chair and rose from the table, shaking his head in response to Cynthia's request that he should go in to see his mother.

        "Not now," he said impatiently, with that nervous avoidance of the person he loved best. "I'll be back in time to carry her to bed, but I've got to take a half-hour off and look in on Tom Spade."

        "She really ought to go to bed before sundown," responded Cynthia, "but nothing under heaven will persuade her to do so. It's her wonderful will that keeps her alive, just as it keeps her sitting bolt upright in that old chair. I don't believe there's another woman on earth who could have done it for more than twenty years."

        Taking down his hat from a big nail in the wall, Christopher stood for a moment abstractedly fingering the brim.

        "Well, I'll be back shortly," he said at last, and went out hurriedly into the darkness.

        At the instant he could not tell why he had so suddenly decided to follow Will Fletcher to the store, but, as usual, when the impulse came to him he proceeded to act promptly as it directed. Strangely enough, the boy was the one human being whom he felt no inclination to avoid, and the least

oppressive moments that he knew were the reckless ones they spent together. While his daily companion was mentally and morally upon a lower plane than his own, the association was not without a balm for his wounded pride; and the knowledge that it was still possible to assume superiority to Fletcher's heir was, so far as he himself admitted, the one consolation that his life contained. As for his feeling toward Will Fletcher as an individual, it was the outcome of so curious a mixture of attraction and repulsion that he had long ceased from any attempt to define it as pure emotion. For the last four years the boy had been, as Tom Spade put it, "the very shadow on the man's footsteps," and yet at the end of that time it was almost impossible for Christopher to acknowledge either his liking or his hatred. He had suffered him for his own end, that was all, and he had come at last almost to enjoy the tolerance that he displayed. The hero-worship - the natural imitation of youth - was at least not unpleasant, and there had been days during a brief absence of the boy when Christopher had, to his surprise, become aware of a positive vacancy in his surroundings. So long as Will made no evident attempt to rise above him - so long, indeed, as Fletcher's grandson kept to Fletcher's level, it was possible that the companionship would continue as harmoniously as it had begun.

        In the store he found Tom Spade and his wife - an angular, strong-featured woman, in purple calico, who carried off the reputation of a shrew with noisy honours. When he asked for Will, the store-keeper turned from the cash-drawer which he was

emptying and nodded toward the half-open door of the adjoining room.

        "Several of the young fellows are in thar now," he remarked offhand, "an' I've jest had to go in an' git between Fred Turner an' Will Fletcher. They came to out-an'-out blows, an' I had to shake 'em both by the scuff of thar necks befo' they'd hish snarlin'. Bless yo' life, all about a woman, too, every last word of it. Well, well, meanin' no disrespect to you, Susan, it's a queer thing that a man can't be born, married, or buried without a woman gittin' herself mixed up in the business. If she ain't wrappin' you in swaddlin' bands, you may be sho' she's measurin' off yo' windin'-sheet. Mark my words, Mr. Christopher, I don't believe thar's ever been a fight fought on this earth - be it a battle or a plain fisticuff - that it warn't started in the brain of somebody's mother, wife, or sweetheart - an' it's most likely to have been the sweetheart. It is strange, when you come to study 'bout it, how sech peaceable-lookin' creaturs as women kin have sech hearty appetites for trouble."

        "Well, trouble may be born of a woman, but it generally manages to take the shape of a man," observed Mrs. Spade from behind the counter, where she was filling a big glass jar with a fresh supply of striped peppermint candy. "And as far as that goes, ever sence the Garden of Eden, men have taken a good deal mo' pleasure in layin' the blame on thar wives than they do in layin' blows on the devil. It's a fortunate woman that don't wake up the day after the weddin' an' find she's married an Adam instid of a man. However, they

are as the Lord made 'em, I reckon," she finished charitably, "which ain't so much to thar credit as it sounds, seein' they could have done over sech a po' job with precious little trouble."

        "Oh, I warn't aimin' at you, Susan," Tom hastened to assure her, aware from experience that he entered an argument only to be worsted. "You've been a good wife to me, for all yo' sharp tongue, an' I've never had to git up an' light the fire sence the day I married you. Yes, you've been a first-rate wife to me, an' no mistake."

        "I'm the last person you need tell that to," was Mrs. Spade's retort. "I don't reckon I've b'iled inside an' sweated outside for mo' than twenty years without knowin' it. Lord! Lord! If it took as hard work to be a Christian as it does to be a wife, thar'd be mighty few but men in the next world - an' they'd git thar jest by followin' like sheep arter Adam - "

        "I declar', Susan, I didn't mean to rile you," urged Tom, breaking in upon the flow of words with an appealing effort to divert its course. "I was merely crackin' a joke with Mr. Christopher, you know."

        "I'm plum sick of these here jokes that's got to have a women on the p'int of 'em," returned Mrs. Spade, tightly screwing on the top of the glass jar. "I've always noticed that thar ain't nothin' so funny in this world but it gits a long sight funnier if a man kin turn it on his wife - "

        "Now, my dear - " helplessly expostulated Tom.

        "My name's Susan, Tom Spade, an' I'll have you

call me by it or not at all. If thar's one thing I hate on this earth it's a 'dear' in the mouth of a married man that ought to know better. I'd every bit as lief you'd shoot a lizard at me, an' you ain't jest found it out. If you think I'm the kind of person to git any satisfaction out of improper speeches you were never mo' mistaken in yo' life; an' I kin print out to you right now that I ain't never heard one of them words yit that I ain't had to pay for it. A 'dear' the mo' is mighty apt to mean a bucket of water the less. Oh, you can't turn my head with yo' soft tricks, Tom Spade. I'm a respectable woman, as my mother was befo' me, an' I don't want familiar doin's from any man, alive or dead. The woman who does, whether she be married or single, ain't no better than a female - that's my opinion!"

        She paused to draw breath, and Tom was quick to take advantage of the intermission. "Good Lord, Mr. Christopher, those darn young fools are at it agin!" he exclaimed, darting toward the adjoining room.

        With a stride, Christopher pushed past him and, opening the door, stopped uncertainly upon the threshold.

        At the first glance he saw that the trouble was between Will and Fred Turner, and that Will, because of his slighter weight, had got very much the worst of the encounter. The boy stood now, trembling with anger and bleeding at the mouth, beside an overturned table, while Fred - a stout, brawny fellow - was busily pummelling his shoulders.

        "You're a sneakin', puny-livered liar, that's what you are!" finished Turner with a vengeance.

        Christopher walked leisurely across the room.

        "And you're another," he observed in a quiet voice - the voice of his courtly father, which always came to him in moments of white heat. "You are exactly that - a sneaking, puny-livered liar." His manner was so courteous that it came as a surprise when he struck out from the shoulder and felled Fred as easily as he might have knocked over a wooden tenpin. "You really must learn better manners," he remarked coolly, looking down upon him.

        Then he wiped his brow on his blue shirt-sleeve and called for a glass of beer.

CHAPTER III
MRS. BLAKE SPEAKS HER MIND ON SEVERAL MATTERS

        "I thought perhaps Christopher might want to use the mare early," he explained to Cynthia, who was clearing off the table. There was a pleasant precision in his speech, acquired with much industry at the little country school, and Cynthia, despite her rigid disfavour, could not but notice that when he glanced round the room in search of Lila he displayed the advantage of an aristocratic profile. Until to-day she could not remember that she had ever seen him directly, as it were; she had looked around him and beyond him, much as she might have obliterated from her vision a familiar shrub that chanced to intrude itself into her point of view. The immediate result of her examination was the possibility she dimly acknowledged that a man might exist as a well-favoured individual and yet belong to an unquestionably lower class of life.

        "Well, I'll go out to the stable," added Jim, after a moment in which he had patiently submitted to her

squinting observation. "Christopher will be somewhere about, I suppose?"

        "Oh, I suppose so," replied Cynthia indifferently, emptying the coffee-grounds into the kitchen sink. The asperity of her tone was caused by the entrance of Lila, who came in with a basin of corn-meal dough tucked under her bared arm, which showed as round and delicate as a child's beneath her loosely rolled-up sleeve.

        "Cynthia, I can't find the hen-house key," she began; and then, catching sight of Jim, she flushed a clear pink, while the little brown mole ran a race with the dimple in her cheek.

        "The key is on that nail beside the dried hops," returned Cynthia sternly. "I found it in the lock last night and brought it in. It's a mercy that the chickens weren't all stolen."

        Without replying, Lila took down the key, strung it on her little finger, and, going to the door, passed with Jim out into the autumn sunshine. Her soft laugh pulsed back presently, and Cynthia, hearing it, set her thin lips tightly as she carefully rinsed the coffee-pot with soda.

        Christopher, who had just come up to the well-brink, where Tucker sat feeding the hounds from a plate of scraps, gave an abrupt nod in the direction of the lovers strolling slowly down the hen-house path.

        "It will end that way some day, I reckon," he said with a sigh, "and you know I'm almost of a mind with Cynthia about it. It does seem a down-right pity. Not that Jim isn't a good chap and all that, but he's an honest, hard-working farmer

and nothing more - and, good heavens! just look at Lila! Why, she's beautiful enough to set the world afire."

        Smiling broadly, Tucker tossed a scrap of corn-bread into Spy's open jaws; then his gaze travelled leisurely to the hen-house, which Lila had just unlocked. As she pushed back the door there was a wild flutter of wings, and the big fowls flew in a swarm about her feet, one great red-and-black rooster craning his long neck after the basin she held beneath her arm. While she scattered the soft dough on the ground she bent her head slightly sideways, looking up at Jim, who stood regarding her with enraptured eyes.

        "Well, I don't know that much good ever comes of setting anything afire," answered Tucker with his amiable chuckle; "the danger is that you're apt to cause a good deal of trouble somewhere, and it's more than likely you'll get singed yourself in putting out the flame. You needn't worry about Lila, Christopher; she's the kind of woman - and they're rare - who doesn't have to have her happiness made to order; give her any fair amount of the raw material and she'll soon manage to fit it perfectly to herself. The stuff is in her, I tell you; the atmosphere is about her - can't you feel it? - and she's going to be happy, whatever comes. A woman who can make over a dress the sixth time as cheerfully as she did the first has the spirit of a Caesar, and doesn't need your lamentations. If you want to be a Jeremiah, you must go elsewhere."

        "Oh, I dare say she'll grow content, but it does seem such a terrible waste. She's the image of that

Saint-Memin portrait of Aunt Susannah, and if she'd only been born a couple of generations ago she would probably have been the belle of two continents. Such women must be scarce anywhere."

        "She's pretty enough, certainly, and I think Jim knows it. There's but one thing I've ever seen that could compare with her for colour, and that's a damask rose that blooms in May on an old bush in the front yard. When all is said, however, that young Weatherby is no clodhopper, you know, and I'm not sure that he isn't worthier of her than any high-sounding somebody across the water would have been. He can love twice as hard, I'll wager, and that's the chief thing, after all; it's worth more than big titles or fine clothes - or even than dead grandfathers, with due respect to Cynthia. I tell you, Lila may never stir from the midst of these tobacco fields; she may be buried alive all her days between these muddy roads that lead heaven knows where and yet she may live a lot bigger and fuller life than she might have done with all London at her feet, as they say it was at your Greataunt Susannah's. The person who has to have outside props to keep him straight must have been made mighty crooked at the start, and Lila's not like that."

        Christopher stooped and pulled Spy's ears.

        "That's as good a way to look at it as any other, I reckon," he remarked; "and now I've got to hurry the shoeing of the mare."

        He crossed over and joined Lila and Jim before the hen-house door, where he put the big fowls to noisy flight.

        "Well, you're a trusty neighbour," he cried

good-humoredly, striking Jim a friendly blow that sent him reeling out into the path.

        Lila passed her hand in a sweeping movement round the inside of the basin and flirted the last drops of dough from her finger-tips.

        "A few of your pats will cripple Jim for a week," she observed, "so you'd better be careful; he's too useful a friend to lose while there are any jobs to do."

        "Why, if I had that muscle I could run a farm with one hand," said Jim. "Give a plough a single push, Christopher, and I believe it would run as long as there was level ground."

        Cynthia, standing at the kitchen window with a cup-towel slung across her arm, watched the three chatting merrily in the sunshine, and the look of rigid resentment settled like a mask upon her face. She was still gazing out upon them when Docia opened the door behind her and informed her in a whisper that "Ole miss wanted her moughty quick."

        "All right, Docia. Is anything the matter?"

        "Naw'm, 'tain' nuttin' 'tall de matter. She's des got fidgetty."

        "Well, I'll come in a minute. Are you better to-day? How's your heart?"

        "Lawd, Miss Cynthia, hit's des bruised all over. Ev'y breaf I draw hits it plum like a hammer. I hyear hit thump, thump, thump all de blessed time."

        "Be careful, then. Tell mother I'm coming at once."

        She hung the cup-towel on the rack, and, taking off her blue checked apron, went along the little

platform to the main part of the house and into the old lady's parlour, where the morning sunshine fell across the faces of generations of dead Blakes. The room was still furnished with the old rosewood furniture, and the old damask curtains hung before the single window, which gave on the overgrown front yard and the twisted aspen. Though the rest of the house suggested only the direst poverty, the immediate surroundings of Mrs. Blake revealed everywhere the lavish ease so characteristic of the old order which had passed away. The carving on the desk, on the book-cases, on the slender sofa, was all wrought by tedious handwork; the delicate damask coverings to the chairs were still lustrous after almost half a century; and the few vases scattered here and there and filled with autumn flowers were, for the most part, rare pieces of old royal Worcester. While it was yet Indian summer, there was no need of fires, and the big fireplace was filled with goldenrod, which shed a yellow dust down on the rude brick hearth.

        The old lady, inspired by her indomitable energy, was already dressed for Tuesday in her black brocade, and sat bolt upright among the pillows in her great oak chair.

        "Some one passed the window whistling, Cynthia. Who was it? The whistle had a pleasant, cheery sound."

        "It must have been Jim Weatherby, I think: old Jacob's son."

        "Is he over here?"

        "To see Christopher - yes."

        "Well, be sure to remind the servants to give him

something to eat in the kitchen before he goes back, and I think, if he's a decent young man, I should like to have a little talk with him about his family. His father used to be one of our most respectable labourers."

        "It would tire you, I fear, mother. Shall I give you your knitting now?"

        "You have a most peculiar idea about me, my child. I have not yet reached my dotage, and I don't think that a little talk with young Weatherby could possibly be much of an ordeal. Is he an improper person?"

        "No, no, of course not; you shall see him whenever you like. I was only thinking of you."

        "Well, I'm sure I am very grateful for your consideration, my dear, but there are times, occasionally, you know, when it is better for one to judge for oneself. I sometimes think that your only fault, Cynthia, is that you are a little - just a very little bit, you understand - inclined to manage things too much. Your poor father used to say that a domineering woman was like a kicking cow, but this doesn't apply to you, of course."

        "Shall I call Jim now, mother?"

        "You might as well, dear. Place a chair for him, a good stout one, and be sure to make him wipe his feet before he comes in. Does he appear to be clean?"

        "Oh, perfectly."

        "I remember his father always was - unusually so for a common labourer. Those people sometimes smell of cattle, you know; and besides, my nose has grown extremely sensitive in the years since I lost my

eyesight. Perhaps it would be as well to hand me the bottle of camphor. I can pretend I have a headache."

        "There's no need, really; he isn't a labourer at all, you know, and he looks quite a gentleman. He is, I believe, considered a very handsome young man."

        Mrs. Blake waved toward the door and the piece of purple glass flashed in the sunlight. "In that case, I might offer him some sensible advice," she said. "The Weatherbys, I remember, always showed a very proper respect for gentle people. I distinctly recall how well Jacob behaved when on one occasion Micajah Blair - a dreadful, dissolute character, though of a very old family and an intimate friend of your father's - took decidedly too much egg-nog one Christmas when he was visiting us, and insisted upon biting Jacob's cheek because it looked so like a winesap. Jacob had come to see your father on business, and I will say that he displayed a great deal of good sense and dignity; he said afterward that he didn't mind the bite on his cheek at all, but that it pained him terribly to see a Virginia gentleman who couldn't balance a bowl of egg-nog. Well, well, Micajah was certainly a rake, I fear; and for that matter, so was his father before him."

        "Father had queer friends," observed Cynthia sadly. "I remember his telling me when I was a little girl that he preferred that family to any in the county."

        "Oh, the family was all right, my dear. I never heard a breath against the women. Now you may fetch Jacob. Is that his name?"

        "No; Jim."

        "Dear me; that's very odd. He certainly should

have been called after his father. I wonder how they could have been so thoughtless."

        Cynthia drew forward an armchair, stooped and carefully arranged the ottoman, and then went with stern determination to look for Jim Weatherby.

        He was sitting in the stable doorway, fitting a shoe on the old mare, while Lila leaned against an overturned barrel in the sunshine outside. At Cynthia's sudden appearance they both started and looked up in amazement, the words dying slowly on their lips.

        "Why, whatever is the matter, Cynthia?" cried Lila, as if in terror.

        Cynthia came forward until she stood directly at the mare's head, where she delivered her message with a gasp:

        "Mother insists upon talking to Jim. There's no help for it; he must come."

        Weatherby dropped the mare's hoof and raised a breathless question to Cynthia's face, while Lila asked quickly:

        "Does she know?"

        "Know what?" demanded Cynthia, turning grimly upon her. "Of course she knows that Jim is his father's son."

        The young man rose and laid the hammer down on the overturned barrel; then he led the mare back to her stall, and coming out again, washed his hands in a tub of water by the door.

        "Well, I'm ready," he observed quietly. "Shall I go in alone?"

        "Oh, we don't ask that of you," said Lila, laughing. "Come; I'll take you."

        She slipped her hand under his arm and they went gaily toward the house, leaving Cynthia to pick up the horseshoe nails lying loose upon the ground.

        Hearing the young man's step on the threshold, Mrs. Blake turned her head with a smile of pleasant condescension and stretched out her delicate yellowed hand.

        "This is Jim Weatherby, mother," said Lila in her softest voice. "Cynthia says you want to talk to him."

        "I know, my child; I know," returned Mrs. Blake, with an animated gesture. "Come in, Jim, and don't trouble to stand. Find him a chair, Lila. I knew your father long before you were born," she added, turning to the young man, "and I knew only good of him. I suppose he has often told you of the years he worked for us?"

        Jim held her hand for an instant in his own, and then, bending over, raised it to his lips.

        "My father never tires of telling us about the old times, and about Mr. Blake and yourself," he answered in his precise English, and with the simple dignity which he never lost. Lila, watching him, prayed silently that a miracle might open the old lady's eyes and allow her to see the kind, manly look upon his face.

        Mrs. Blake nodded pleasantly, with evident desire to put him wholly at his ease.

        "Well, his son is becoming quite courtly," she responded, smiling, "and I know Jacob is proud of you - or he ought to be, which amounts to the same thing. There's nothing I like better than to see a good, hard-working family prosper in life and

raise its station. Not that I mean to put ideas into your head, of course, for it is a ridiculous sight to see a person dissatisfied with the position in which the good Lord has placed him. That was what I always liked about your mother, and I remember very well her refusing to wear some of my old finery when she was married, on the ground that she was a plain honest woman, and wanted to continue so when she was a wife. I hope, by the way, that she is well."

        "Oh, quite. She does not walk much, though; her joints have been troubling her."

        To Lila's surprise, he was not the least embarrassed by the personal tone of the conversation, and his sparkling blue eyes held their usual expression of blithe good-humour.

        "Indeed!" Mrs. Blake pricked at the subject in her sprightly way. "Well, you must persuade her to use a liniment of Jamestown weed steeped in whisky. There is positively nothing like it for rheumatism. Lila, do we still make it for the servants? If so, you might send Sarah Weatherby a bottle."

        "I'll see about it, mother. Aren't you tired? Shall I take Jim away?"

        "Not just yet, child. I am interested in seeing what a promising young man he has become. How old are you, Jim?"

        "Twenty-nine next February. There are two of us, you know - I've a sister Molly. She married Frank Granger and moved ten miles away."

        "Ah, that brings me to the very point I was driving at. Above all things, let me caution you most earnestly against the reckless marriages so common in your station of life. For heaven's sake,

don't marry a woman because she has a pretty face and you cherish an impracticable sentiment for her. If you take my advice, you will found your marriage upon mutual respect and industry. Select a wife who is not afraid of work, and who expects no folderol of romance. Love-making, I've always maintained, should be the pastime of the leisure class exclusively."

        "I'm not afraid of work myself," replied Jim, laughing as he looked boldly into the old lady's sightless eyes, "but I'd never stand it for my wife - not a - a lick of it!"

        "Tut, tut! Your mother does it."

        Jim nodded. "But I'm not my father," he mildly suggested.

        "Well, you're a fine, headstrong young fool, and I like you all the better for it," declared Mrs. Blake. "You may go now, because I feel as if I needed a doze; but be sure to come in and see me the next time you're over here. Lila, put the cat on my knees and straighten my pillows."

        Lila lifted the cat from the rug and placed it in the old lady's lap; then, as she arranged the soft white pillows, she bent over suddenly and kissed the piece of purple glass on the fragile hand.

CHAPTER IV
IN WHICH CHRISTOPHER HESITATES

        "So you let Fred smash you up, eh?" he observed with a sneer.

        Will flushed.

        "Oh, you needn't talk like that," he answered; "he's the biggest man about here except you. By the way, you're a bully friend to a fellow, you know, and it's not a particle of use pretending you don't like me, because you can't help hitting back jolly quick when anybody undertakes to give me a licking."

        "Why were you such a fool as to go at him?" inquired Christopher, glancing up at his evenly hanging rows of tobacco, and then coming outside to lock the door." You'll never get a reputation as a fighter if you are always jumping on men over your own size. Now, next time I should advise you to try your spirit on Sol Peterkin."

        "Oh, it was all about Molly," explained Will frankly. "I told Fred that he was a big blackguard

to use the girl so, and then he called me a 'white-livered liar.' "

        "I heard him," remarked Christopher quietly.

        "Well, I don't care what he says - he is a blackguard. I'm glad you knocked him down, too; it was no more than he deserved."

        "I didn't do it on Molly Peterkin's account, you know. Tobacco takes up quite enough of my time without my entering the lists as a champion of light women. But if you aren't man enough to fight your own battles, I suppose I'll have to keep my muscle in proper shape."

        Will smarted from the words, and the corners of his mouth took a dogged droop.

        "I don't see how you expect me to be a match for Fred Turner," he returned angrily.

        "Why, I don't expect it," replied Christopher coolly, as he turned the key in the padlock, drew it out, and slipped it into his pocket. "I expect you merely to keep away from him, that's all."

        Will stared at him in perplexity. "What a devil of a humour you are in!" he exclaimed.

        "Am I?" Christopher broke into a laugh. "You are accustomed to the sunny temper of your grandfather. How is he to-day? In his usual cheerful vein?"

        "Oh, he's awful," answered the boy, relieved at the change of subject. "If you could only have heard him yesterday! Somebody told him about the fight at the store, and, as luck would have it, he found out that Molly Peterkin was at the bottom of it all. When he called me into his room and locked the door I knew something was up; and sure

enough, we had blood and thunder for two mortal hours. He threatened to sell the horses and the hounds, and to put me at the plough, if I ever so much as looked at the girl again - 'gal,' he called her, and a 'brazen wench.' That is the way he talks, you know."

        "I know," Christopher nodded gravely.

        "But the funny part is, that the thing that made him hottest was your knocking over Fred Turner. That he simply couldn't stand. Why, he'd have paid Fred fifty dollars down to thrash me black and blue, he said. He called you - Oh, he has a great store of pet names!"

        "What ?" asked Christopher, for the other caught himself up suddenly.

        "Nothing much - he's always doing it, you know."

        "You needn't trouble yourself on my account. I'm familiar with his use of words."

        "Oh, he called you 'a crazy pauper who ought to be in gaol.' "

        "He did, did he? Well, for once in his life he drew it mild." Then he gave a long whistle and kicked away a rock in the path. " 'A crazy pauper who ought to be in gaol.' I've a pretty good-sized debt to settle with your grandfather, when I come to think of it."

        "Just suppose you were in my place now," insisted Will. "Then I reckon you'd have cause for swearing, sure enough. I tell you I couldn't get out of that room yesterday until I promised him I'd turn over a new leaf - that I'd start in with Mr. Morrison to-morrow, and dig away at Latin and Greek until I go to the university next fall."

        Christopher turned quickly.

        "To-morrow?" he repeated. "Why, that's the day I had planned we'd go hunting. Make Morrison's Friday."

        The boy wavered.

        "Can't we go another day?" he asked. "He's so awfully set on to-morrow. I'd have to be mighty sharp to fool him again."

        "Oh, well, but it's the only day I've free. There's a lot of fall ploughing to do; then the apples are ready to be gathered; and I must take some corn to the mill before the week's up. I've wasted too much time with you as it is. It's the only wealth I have, you see."

        "Then I'll go - I'll go," declared Will jumping to a decision."There'll be a terrific fuss if he finds it out, but perhaps he won't. I'll bring my gun over to the barn to-night, and get Zebbadee to meet us with the hounds at the bend in the road. Well, I must get back now. I don't want him to suspect I've seen you to-day."

        He started off at a rapid pace, and Christopher, turning in the other direction, went to bring the horses from the distant pasture. It was a mellow afternoon, and a golden haze wrapped the broad meadow, filled with autumn wild flowers, and the little bricked-up graveyard on the low, green hill. As he swung himself over the bars at the end of the path he saw Lila and Jim Weatherby gathering goldenrod in the center of the field. When they caught sight of him, Jim laid his handful of blossoms in a big basket on the ground and came to join him on his way to the pasture.

        "They are for Mrs. Blake's fireplace," he remarked with a friendly smile, as he glanced back at Lila standing knee-deep amid the October flowers.

        "It's a queer idea," observed Christopher, finding himself at a loss for a reply.

        Jim strolled on leisurely, snatching at the heads of wild carrot as he passed.

        "There's something I've wanted to tell you, Christopher," he said after a moment, turning his pleasant, manly face upon the other.

        "Is that so?" asked Christopher, with a sudden desire to avert the impending responsibility. "Oh, but I hardly think I'm the proper person," he added, laughing.

        Jim met his eyes squarely.

        "I'm a plain man," he said slowly, "and though I'm not ashamed of it, I know, of course, that my family have always been plain people. As things are, I had no business on earth to fall in love with your sister, but all the same it's what I've gone and done."

        Christopher nodded and walked on.

        "Well, I suppose it's what I should have done, too, in your place," he returned quietly.

        "I've reproached myself for it often enough," pursued Jim; "but when all is said, how can a man prevent a thing like that? I might as well try to shut my eyes to the sun when it is shining straight on me. Why, everybody else seems dull and lifeless when I look at her - and I seem such a brute myself that I hardly dare touch her hand. All I ask is to be her servant until I die."

        It took courage to speak such words, and

Christopher, knowing it, stopped midway of the little path and regarded Jim with the rare smile which gave a boyish brightness to his face.

        "By George, you are a trump!" he said heartily. "And as far as that goes, you're good enough for Lila or for anybody else. It isn't that, you see it's only - "

        "I know," finished Jim quietly and without resentment; "it's my grandfather. Your sister, Cynthia, told me, and I reckon it's all natural, but somehow I can't make myself ashamed of the old man - nor is Lila, for that matter. He was an honest, upright body as ever you saw, and he never did a mean thing in his life, though he lived to be almost ninety."

        "You're right," said Christopher, flushing suddenly; "and as far as I'm concerned, I'd let Lila marry you to-morrow; but as for mother, she would simply never consent. The idea would be impossible to her, and we could never explain things, you must see that yourself."

        "I see," replied Jim readily; "but the main point is that you yourself would have no objection to our marriage, provided it were possible."

        "Not a bit; not a bit."

        He held out his hand, and Jim shook it warmly before he picked up his basket and went to rejoin Lila.

        Turning in the path, Christopher saw the girl who was sitting alone on the lowered bars, rise and wave a spray of goldenrod above her head. Then as the lovers met, she laid her hand upon Jim's arm and lifted her glowing face as if to read his

words before he uttered them. Something in the happy surrender of her gesture, or in the brooding mystery of the Indian summer, when one seemed to hear the earth turn in the stillness, touched Christopher with a sudden melancholy, and it appeared to him when he went on again that a shadow had fallen over the brightness of the autumn fields. Disturbed by the unrest which follows any illuminating vision of ideal beauty, he asked himself almost angrily, in an effort to divert his thoughts, if it were possible that he was weakening in his purpose, since he no longer found the old zest in his hatred of Fletcher. The deadness of his emotions had then affected this one also - the single feeling which he had told himself would be eternal; and the old nervous thrill, so like the thrill of violent love, no longer troubled him when he chanced to meet his enemy face to face. To-day he held Will Fletcher absolutely in his hand, he knew; in a few years at most his debt to Fletcher would probably be cancelled; the man and the boy would then be held together by blood ties like two snarling hounds in the leash - and yet, when all was said, what would the final outcome yield of satisfaction? As he put the question he knew that he could meet it only by evasion, and his inherited apathy enfeebled him even while he demanded an answer of himself.

        As the months went on, his indifference to success or failure pervaded him like a physical lethargy, and he played his game so recklessly at last that he sometimes caught himself wondering if it were, after all, worth a single flicker of the candle. He still saw Will Fletcher daily; but when the spring

came he ceased consciously, rather from weariness than from any nobler sentiment, to exert an influence which he felt to be harmful to the boy. For four years he had wrought tirelessly to compass the ruin of Fletcher's ambition; and now, when he had but to stretch forth his arm for the final blow, he admitted impatiently that what he lacked was the impulsive energy the deed required.

        He was still in this mood when, one afternoon in April, as he was driving his oxen to the store, he met Fletcher in the road behind the pair of bays. At sight of him the old man's temper slipped control, and at the end of a few minutes they were quarrelling as to who should be the one to turn aside.

        "Git out of the road, will you?" cried Fletcher half rising from his seat and jerking at the reins until the horses reared. "Drive your brutes into the bushes and let me pass!"

        "If you think I'm going to swerve an inch out of my road to oblige you, Bill Fletcher, you are almost as big a fool as you are a rascal," replied Christopher in a cool voice, as he brought his team to a halt and placed himself at the head of it with his long rawhide whip in his hand.

        As he stood there he had the appearance of taking his time as lightly as did the Olympian deities; and it was clear that he would wait patiently until the sun set and rose again rather than yield one jot or tittle of his right upon the muddy road. While he gazed placidly over Fletcher's head into the golden distance, he removed his big straw hat and began fanning his heated face.

        There followed a noisy upbraiding from Fletcher,

which ended by his driving madly into the underbrush and almost overturning the heavy carriage. As he passed, he leaned from his seat and slashed his whip furiously into Christopher's face; then he drove on at a wild pace, bringing the horses in a shiver, and flecked with foam, into the gravelled drive before the Hall.

        The bright flower-beds and the calm white pillars were all in sunshine, and Miss Saidie, with a little, green watering-pot in her hand, was sprinkling a tub of crocuses beside the steps.

        "You look flustered, Brother Bill," she observed, as Fletcher threw the reins to a Negro servant and came up to where she stood.

        "Oh, I've just had some words with that darned Blake," returned Fletcher, chewing the end of his mustache, as he did when he was in a rage. "I met him as I drove up the road and he had the impudence to keep his ox-cart standing plumb still while I tore through the briers. It's the third time this thing has happened, and I'll be even with him for it yet."

        "I'm sure he must be a very rude person," remarked Miss Saidie, pinching off a withered blossom and putting it in her pocket to keep from throwing it on the trim grass. "For my part, I've never been able to see what satisfaction people git out of being ill-mannered. It takes twice as long as it does to be polite, and it's not nearly so good for the digestion afterward."

        Fletcher listened to her with a scowl. "Well, if you ever get anything but curses from Christopher Blake, I'd like to hear of it," he said, with a coarse laugh.

        "Why, he was really quite civil to me the other day when I passed him," replied Miss Saidie, facing Fletcher with her hand resting on the belt of her apron. "I was in the phaeton, and he got down off his wagon and picked up my whip. I declare, it almost took my breath away, but when I thanked him he raised his hat and spoke very pleasantly."

        "Oh, you and your everlasting excuses!" sneered Fletcher, going up the steps and turning on the porch to look down upon her. "I tell you I've had as many of 'em as I'm going to stand. This is my house, and what I say in it has got to be the last word. If you squirt any more of that blamed water around here the place will rot to pieces under our very feet."

        Miss Saidie placed her watering-pot on the step and lifted to him the look of amiable wonder which he found more irritating than a sharp retort.

        "I forgot to tell you that Susan Spade has been waiting to speak to you," she remarked, as if their previous conversation had been of the friendliest nature.

        "Oh, drat her! What does she want?" "She wouldn't tell me - it was for you alone, she said. That was a good half-hour ago, and she's been waiting in your setting-room ever sence. She's such a sharp-tongued woman I wonder how Tom manages to put up with her."

        "Well, if he does, I won't," growled Fletcher, as he went in to meet his visitor.

        Mrs. Spade, wearing a severe manner and a freshly starched purple calico, was sitting straight and stiff on the edge of the cretonne-covered lounge, and

as he entered she rose to receive him with a visible unbending of her person. She was a lank woman, with a long, scrawny figure which appeared to have run entirely to muscle, and very full skirts that always sagged below the belt-line in the back. Her face was like that of a man - large-featured, impressive, and not without a ruddy masculine comeliness.

        "It's my duty that's brought me, Mr. Fletcher," she began, as they shook hands. "You kin see very well yo'self that it's not a pleasure, as far as that goes, for if it had been I never should have come - not if I yearned and pined till I was sore. I never saw a pleasure in my life that didn't lead astray, an' I've got the eye of suspicion on the most harmless-lookin' one that goes. As I tell Tom - though he won't believe it - the only way to be sartain you're followin' yo' duty in this world is to find out the thing you hate most to do an' then do it with all yo' might. That rule has taken me through life, suh; it married me to Tom Spade, an' it's brought me here to-day. 'Don't you go up thar blabbin' on Will Fletcher,' said Tom, when I was tyin' on my bonnet. 'You needn't say one word mo' about it,' was my reply. 'I know the Lord's way, an' I know mine. I've wrestled with this in pra'r, an' I tell you when the Lord turns anybody's stomach so dead agin a piece of business, it means most likely that it's the very thing they've got to swallow down."

        "Oh, Will!" gasped Fletcher, dropping suddenly into his armchair. "Please come to the point at once, ma'am, and let me hear what the rascal has done last."

        "I'm comin', suh; I'm comin'," Mrs. Spade hastened to assure him. "Yes, Tom an' I hev talked it all down to the very bone, but I wouldn't trust a man's judgment on morals any mo' than I would on matchin' calico. Right an' wrong don't look the same to 'em by lamplight as they do by day, an' if thar conscience ain't set plum' in the pupils of thar eyes, I don't know whar 'tis, that's sho'. But, thank heaven, I ain't one of those that's always findin' an excuse for people - not even if the backslider be my own husband. Thar's got to be some few folks on the side of decency, an' I'm one of 'em. Virtue's a slippery thing - that's how I look at it - an' if you don't git a good grip on it an' watch it with a mighty stern eye it's precious apt to wriggle through yo' fingers. I'm an honest woman, Mr. Fletcher, an' I wouldn't blush to own it in the presence of the King of England - "

        "Great Scott!" exclaimed Fletcher, with a brutal laugh; "do you mean to tell me the precious young fool has fallen in love with you?"

        "Me, suh? If he had, a broomstick an' a spar' rib or so would have been all you'd ever found of him agin. I've never yit laid eyes on the man I couldn't settle with a single sweep, an' when a lone woman comes to wantin' a protector, I've never seen the husband that could hold a candle to a good stout broom. That's what I said to Jinnie when she got herself engaged to Fred Boxley. 'Married or single,' I said, 'gal, wife, or widow, a broom is yo' best friend.' "

        Fletcher twisted impatiently in his chair.

        "Oh, for heaven's sake, stop your drivelling," he

blurted out at last, "and tell me in plain language what the boy has done."

        "Oh, I don't know what he's done or what he hasn't," rejoined Mrs. Spade, "but I've watched him courtin' Molly Peterkin till I told Tom this thing had to stop or I would stop it. If thar's a p'isonous snake or lizard in this country, suh, it's that tow-headed huzzy of Sol Peterkin's; an' if thar's a sex on this earth that I ain't go no patience with, it's the woman sex. A man may slip an' slide a little because he was made that way, but when it comes to a woman she's got to w'ar whalebones in her clothes when I'm aroun'. Lord! Lord! What's the use of bein' honest if you can't p'int yo' finger at them that ain't? Virtue gits mighty little in the way of gewgaws in this world, an' I reckon it's got to make things up in the way it feels when it looks at them that's gone astray - "

        "Molly Peterkin!" gasped Fletcher, striking the arm of his chair a blow that almost shattered it. "Christopher Blake was bad enough, and now it's Molly Peterkin! Out of the frying-pan right spang into the fire. Oh, you did me a good turn in coming, Mrs. Spade. I'll forgive you the news you brought, and I'll even forgive you your blasted chatter. How long has this thing been going on, do you know?"

        "That I don't, suh, that I don't; though I've been pryin' an' peekin' mighty close. All I know is, that every blessed evenin' for the last two weeks I've seen 'em walkin' together in the lane that leads to Sol's. This here ain't goin' to keep up one day mo'; that's what I put my foot down on yestiddy. I'd

stop it if I didn't have nothin' agin that gal but the colour of her hair. I don' know how 'tis, suh, but I've always had the feelin' that thar's somethin' indecent about yaller hair, an' if I'd been born with it I'd have stuck my head into a bowl of pitch befo' I'd have gone flauntin' those corn-tassels in the eyes of every man I met. Thar's nothin' in the looks of me that's goin' to make a man regret he's got a wife if I can help it; an' mark my word, Mr. Fletcher, if they had dyed Molly Peterkin's hair black she might have been a self-respectin' woman an' a hater of men this very day. A light character an' a light head go precious well together, an' when you set one a good sober colour the other's pretty apt to follow."

        Fletcher rose from his chair and stood gripping the table hard.

        "Have you any reason to think - does it look likely - that young Blake has had a hand in this?" he asked.

        "Who? Mr. Christopher? Why, I don't believe he could tell a petticoat from a pair of breeches to save his soul. He ain't got no fancy for corn-tassels and blue ribbons, I kin tell you that. It's good honest women that are the mothers of families that he takes to, an' even then it ain't no mo' than 'How are you, Mrs. Spade? A fine mornin'!' "

        "Well, thar's one thing you may be sartain of," returned Fletcher, breaking in upon her, "and that is that this whole business is as good as settled. I leave here with the boy to-morrow morning at sunrise, and he doesn't set foot agin in this county until he's gone straight through the university.

I'll drag him clean across the broad ocean before he shall do it."

        Then, as Mrs. Spade