---

        "No, no, no," she protested. "Why, I love them all - all, do you hear, and I love Will more than the rest of them put together."

        He looked away from her, and then, turning, waited for the oxen to reach the summit of the hill.

        "You'd better get in now, I think," he said; "there is a long walk ahead of us, and if my team is slow it is sure also."

        As he brought the oxen to a halt, she laid her hand for an instant on his arm, and, mounting lightly upon the wheel, stepped into the cart.

        "Now give me Agag," she said, and he handed her the little dog before he took up the ropes and settled himself beside her on the driver's seat. "You look like one of the disinherited princesses in the old stories mother tells," he observed.

        A puzzled wonder was in her face as she turned toward him.

        "Who are you? And what has Blake Hall to do with your family?" she asked.

        "Only that it was named after us. We used to live there."

        "Within your recollection?"

        He nodded, with his eyes on the slow oxen.

        "Then you have not always been a farmer?"

        "Ever since I was ten years old."

        "I can't understand, I can't understand," she said, perplexed. "You are like no one about here; you are like no one I have ever seen."

        "Then I must be like you," he returned bluntly.

        "Like me? Oh, heavens, no; you would make three of me - body, brain, and soul. I believe, when I think of it, that you are the biggest man I've ever

known - and by that I don't mean in height - for I have seen men with a greater number of physical inches. Inches, somehow, have very little to do with the impression - and so has muscle, strong as yours is. It is simple bigness that I am talking about, and it was the first thing I noticed in you - "

        "At the cross-roads?" he asked, and instantly regretted his words.

        "No; not at the cross-roads," she answered, smiling. "You have a good memory, but mine is better. I saw you once on a June morning, when I was riding along the road with the chestnuts and you were standing out in the field."

        "I did not see you or I should have remembered," he said quietly.

        Silence fell between them, and he was conscious in every fiber of his body that he had never been so close to her before - had never felt the touch of her arm upon his own, nor the folds of her skirt brushing against his knees. A gust of wind whipped the end of her veil into his face, and when she turned to recapture it he felt her warm breath on his cheek. The sense of her nearness pervaded him from head to foot, and an unrest like that produced by the spring wind troubled his heart. He did not look at her, and yet he saw her full dark eyes and the curve of her white throat more distinctly than he beheld the blue sky at which he gazed. Was it possible that she, too, shared his disquietude? he wondered, or was the silence that she kept as undisturbed as her tranquil pose?

        "I should not have forgotten it," he repeated presently, turning to meet her glance.

        She started and looked away from the landscape. "You have long memories in this county, I know," she said. "So few things happen that it becomes a religion to cherish the little incidents. It may be that I, too, have inherited something of this, for I remember very clearly the few months I spent here."

        "You remembered them even while you were away?"

        "Why not?" she asked. "It is not the moving about, the strange places one sees, nor the people one meets, that really count in life, you know."

        "What is it?" he questioned abruptly.

        She hesitated as if trying to put her thoughts more clearly into words.

        "I think it is the things one learns," she said; "the places in which we take root and grow, and the people who teach us what is really worth while - patience, and charity, and the beauty there is in the simplest and most common lives when they are lived close to Nature."

        "In driving the plough or in picking the suckers from a tobacco plant," he added scornfully.

        "In those things, yes; and in any life that is good, and true, and natural."

        "Well, I have lived near enough to Nature to hate her with all my might," he answered, not without bitterness. "Why, there are times when I'd like to kick every ploughed field I see out into eternity. Tobacco-growing is one of the natural things, I suppose, but if you want to see any beauty in it you must watch it from a shady road. When you get in the midst of it you'll find it coarse and sticky,

and given over generally to worms. I have spent my whole life working on it, and to this day I never look at a plant nor smell a pipe without a shiver of disgust. The things I want are over there," he finished, pointing with his whip-handle to the clear horizon. "I want the excitement that makes one's blood run like wine."

        "Battle, murder, and all that, I suppose?" she said, smiling.

        "War, and fame, and love," he corrected.

        Her face had grown grave, and in the thoughtful look she turned upon him it seemed to him that he saw a purpose slowly take form. So earnest was her gaze that at last his own fell before it, at which she murmured a confused apology, like one forcibly awakened from a dream.

        "I was wondering what that other life would have made of you," she said; "the life that I have known and wearied of - a life of petty shams, of sham love, of sham hate, of sham religion. It is all little, you know, and it takes a little soul to keep alive in it. I craved it once myself, and it took six years of artifice to teach me that I loved a plain truth better than a pretty lie."

        He had been looking at the strong white hand lying in her lap, and now, with a laugh, he held out his own bronzed and roughened one.

        "There is the difference," he said; "do you see it?"

        A wave of sympathy swept over her expressive face, and with one of her impulsive gestures, which seemed always to convey some spiritual significance, she touched his outstretched palm with her fingers.

        "How full of meaning it is," she replied, "for it

tells of quiet days in the fields, and of a courage that has not faltered before the thing it hates. When I look at it it makes me feel very humble - and yet very proud, too, that some day I may be your friend."

        He shook his head, with his eyes on the sun, which was slowly setting.

        "That is out of the question," he answered. "You cannot be my friend except for this single day. If I meet you to-morrow I shall not know you."

        "Because I am a Fletcher?" she asked, wondering.

        "Because you are a Fletcher, and because you would find me worse than a Fletcher."

        "Riddles, riddles," she protested, laughing; "and I was always dull at guessing - but I may as well warn you now that I have come home determined to make a friend of every mortal in the county, man and beast."

        "You'll do it," he answered seriously. "I'm the only thing about here that will resist you. You'll be everybody's friend but mine."

        She caught and held his gaze. "Let us see," she responded quietly.

        For a time they were silent, and spreading out her skirt, she made a place for the dog upon it. The noise of the heavy wheels on the rocky bed of the road grew suddenly louder in his ears, and he realised with a pang that every jolt of the cart carried him nearer the end. With the thought there came to him a wish that life might pause at the instant - that the earth might be arrested in its passage and leave him forever aware of the warm contact that thrilled through him.

        They had already passed Weatherby's lane, and

presently the chimneys of Blake Hall appeared above the distant trees. When they reached the abandoned ice-pond Christopher spoke with an attempted carelessness.

        "It would perhaps be better for you to walk the rest of the way," he said. "Trouble might be made in the beginning if your grandfather were to know that I brought you over."

        "You're right, I think," she said, and rising as the cart stopped, she followed him down into the road. Then with a word or two of thanks, she smiled brightly, and, calling the dog, passed rapidly into the twilight which stretched between him and a single shining window that was visible in the Hall.

        After she had quite disappeared he still stood motionless by the ice-pond, staring into the dusk that had swallowed her up from his gaze. So long did he remain there that at last the oxen tired of waiting and began to move slowly on along the sunken road. Then starting abruptly from his meditation, he picked up the ropes that trailed before him on the ground and fell into his accustomed walk beside the cart. At the moment it seemed to him that his whole life was shattered into pieces by the event of a single instant. Something stronger than himself had shaken the foundations of his nature, and he was not the man that he had been before. He was like one born blind, who, when his eyes are opened, is ignorant that the light which dazzles him is merely the shining of the sun.

        When he came into the house, after putting up the oxen, Cynthia commented upon the dazed look that he wore.

        "You must have fallen asleep on the way home," she remarked.

        "It is the glare of the lamp," he answered. "I have just come out of the darkness," and before sitting down to his supper, he opened the door and listened for the sound of his mother's voice.

        "She is asleep, then?" he said, coming back again. "Has she recognised either of you to-day?"

        "No; she wanders again. The present is nothing to her any longer - it is all blotted out with everything that Fletcher told her. She asks for father constantly, and the only thing that interested her was when Jim went in and talked to her about farming. She is quite rational except that she has entirely forgotten the last twenty years, and just before falling asleep she laughed heartily over some old stories of Grandpa Bolivar's."

        "Then I may see her for a minute?"

        "If you wish it - yes."

        Passing along the hall, he entered the little chamber where the old lady lay asleep in her tester bed. Her fine white hair was brushed over the pillow, and her drawn and yellowed face wore a placid and childlike look. As he paused beside her a faint smile flickered about her mouth and her delicate hand trembled slightly upon the couterpane. Her dreams had evidently brought her happiness, and as he stood looking down upon her the wish entered his heart that he might change his young life for her old one - that he might become, in her place, half dead, and done with all that the future could bring of either joy or grief.

CHAPTER II
MARIA RETURNS TO THE HALL

        A lamp burned dimly in the center of the old mahogany table, where a scant supper for two had been hastily laid. In the fireplace a single hickory log sent out a shower of fine sparks, which hovered a moment in the air before they were sucked up by the big stone chimney.

        The room was just as Maria had left it six years before, and yet in some unaccountable fashion it

seemed to have lost the dignity which she remembered as its one redeeming feature. Nothing was changed that she could see - the furniture stood in the same places, the same hard engravings hung on the discoloured walls - but as she glanced wonderingly about her she was aware of a shock greater than the one she had nerved herself to withstand. It was, after all, the atmosphere that depressed her, she concluded with her next thought - the general air of slovenly unrefinement revealed in the details of the room and of the carelessly laid table.

        While she still hesitated uncertainly on the threshold, the pantry door opened noiselessly and Miss Saidie appeared, carrying a glass dish filled with preserved watermelon rind. At sight of Maria she gave a start and a little scream, and the dish fell from her hands and crashed upon the floor.

        "Sakes alive! Is that you, Maria?"

        Hastily crossing the room, Maria caught the little woman in her arms and kissed her twice.

        "Why, you poor thing! I've frightened you to death," she said, with a laugh.

        "You did give me a turn; that's so," replied Miss Saidie, as she wiped the moisture from her crimson face. "It's been so long since anybody's come here that Malindy - she's the only servant we've got now - was actually afraid to answer your knock. Then when I came in and saw you standing by the door, I declare it almost took my breath clean away. I thought for a moment you were a ghost, you looked so dead white in that long, black dress."

        "Oh, I'm flesh and blood, never fear," Maria assured her. "Much more flesh and blood, too, than

I was when I went away - but I've made you spill all your preserves. What a shame!"

        Miss Saidie glanced down a little nervously. "I must wipe it up before Brother Bill comes in," she said; "it frets him so to see a waste."

        Picking up a dust-cloth she had left on a chair, she got down on her knees and began mopping up the sticky syrup which trickled along the floor. "He hates so to throw away anything," she pursued, panting softly from her exertions, "that if he were to see this I believe it would upset him for a week. Oh, he didn't use to be like that, I know," she added, meeting Maria's amazed look; "and it does seem strange, for I'm sure he gets richer and richer every day - but it's the gospel truth that every cent he makes he hugs closer than he did the last. I declare, I've seen him haggle for an hour over the price of salt, and it turns him positively sick to see anything but specked potatoes on the table. He kinder thinks his money is all he's got, I reckon, so he holds on to it like grim death."

        "But it isn't all he has. Where's Will?"

        Miss Saidie shook her head, with a glance in the direction of the door.

        "Don't mention him if you want any peace," she said, rising with difficulty to her feet. "Your grandpa has never so much as laid eyes on him sence he gave him that little worn-out place side by side with Sol Peterkin - and told him he'd shoot him if he ever caught sight of him at the Hall. You've come home to awful worry, thar's no doubt of it, Maria."

        "Oh, oh, oh," sighed Maria, and, tossing her hat

upon the sofa, pressed her fingers on her temples. With the firelight thrown full on the ivory pallor of her face, the effect she produced was almost unreal in its intensity of black and white - an absence of colour which had in it all the warmth and the animation we are used to associate with brilliant hues. A peculiar mellowness of temperament, the expression of a passionate nature confirmed in sympathy, shone in the softened fervour of her look as she bent her eyes thoughtfully upon the flames.

        "Something must be done for Will," she said, turning presently. "This can't go on another day."

        Miss Saidie caught her breath sharply, and hastened to the head of the table, as Fletcher's heavy footsteps crossed the hall.

        "For heaven's sake, be careful," she whispered warningly, jerking her head nervously from side to side.

        Fletcher entered with a black look, slamming the door heavily behind him, then, suddenly catching sight of Maria, he stopped short on the threshold and stared at her with hanging jaws.

        "I'll be blessed if it ain't Maria!" he broke out at last.

        Maria went toward him and held out her cheek for his kiss.

        "I've surprised you almost as much as I did Aunt Saidie," she said, with her cheerful laugh, which floated a little strangely on the sullen atmosphere.

        Catching her by the shoulder, Fletcher drew her into the circle of the lamplight, where he stood regarding her in gloomy silence.

        "You've filled out considerable," he remarked, as he released her at the end of his long scrutiny. "But thar was room for it, heaven knows. You'll never be the sort that a man smacks his lips over, I reckon, but you're a plum sight better looking than you were when you went away."

        Maria winced quickly as if he had struck her; then, regaining her composure almost instantly, she drew back her chair with a casual retort.

        "But I didn't come home to set the county afire," she said. "Why, Aunt Saidie, what queer, coarse china! What's become of the white-and-gold set I used to like?"

        A purple flush mounted slowly to Miss Saidie's forehead.

        "I was afraid it would chip, so I packed it away," she explained. "Me and Brother Bill ain't used to any better than this, so we don't notice. Things will have to be mighty fine now, I reckon, since you've got back. You were always particular about looks I remember."

        "Was I?" asked Maria curiously, glancing down into the plate before her. For the last few years she had schooled herself to despise what she called the "silly luxuries of living," and yet the heavy white cup which Miss Saidie handed her, and the sound of Fletcher drinking his coffee, aroused in her the old poignant disgust.

        "I don't think I'm over particular now," she added pleasantly, "but we may as well get out the other china to-morrow, I think."

        "You won't find many fancy ways here - eh, Saidie?" inquired Fletcher, with a chuckle. "Thar's

been a precious waste of victuals on this place, but it's got to stop. I ain't so sure you did a wise thing in coming back," he finished abruptly, turning his bloodshot eyes on his granddaughter.

        "You aren't? Well, I am," laughed Maria; "and I promise you that you shan't find me troublesome except in the matter of china."

        "Then you must have changed your skin, I reckon."

        "Changed? Why, I have, of course. Six years isn't a day, you know, and I've been in many places." Then, as a hint of interest awoke in his eyes, she tallied rapidly describing her years abroad and the strange cities in which she had lived. Before she had finished, Fletcher had pushed his plate away and sat listening with the ghost of a smile upon his face.

        "Well, you'll do, I reckon," he said at the end, and, pushing back his chair, he rose from his place and stamped out into the hall.

        When he had gone into his sitting-room and closed the door behind him, Miss Saidie nodded smilingly, as she measured out the servant's sugar in a cracked saucer. "He's brighter than I've seen him for days," she said; "and now, if you want to go upstairs, Malindy has jest lighted your fire. She had to carry the wood up while we were at supper, so Brother Bill wouldn't see it. He hates even to burn a log, though they are strewn round loose all over the place."

        Maria was feeding Agag on the hearth, and she waited until he had finished before she took up her hat and wraps and went toward the door. "Oh, you needn't bother to light me," she said, waving Miss

Saidie back when she would have followed." Why, I could find my way over this house at midnight without a candle." Then, with a cheerful "Goodnight," she called Agag and went up the dusky staircase.

        A wood fire was burning in her room, and she stood for a moment looking pensively into the flames, a faint smile sketched about her mouth. Then throwing off her black dress in the desire for freedom, she clasped her hands above her head and paced slowly up and down the shadowy length of the room. In the flowing measure of her walk; in the free, almost defiant, movement of her upraised arms, and in the ample lines of her throat and bosom, which melted gradually into the low curves of her hips, she might have stood for an incarnation of vital force. One felt instinctively that her personality would be active rather than passive - that the events which she attracted to herself would be profoundly emotional in their fulfilment.

        Notwithstanding the depressing hour she had just passed, and the old vulgarity which had shocked her with a new violence, she was conscious, moving to and fro in the shadows, of a strange happiness - of a warmth of feeling which pervaded her from head to foot, which fluttered in her temples and burned like firelight in her open palms. The place was home to her, she realised at last, and the surroundings of her married life - the foreign towns and the enchanting Italian scenery - showed in her memory with a distant and alien beauty. Here was what she loved, for here was her right, her heritage - the desolate red roads, the luxuriant tobacco fields, the

primitive and ignorant people. In her heart there was no regret for any past that she had known, for over the wild country stretching about her now there hung a romantic and mysterious haze.

        A little later she was aroused from her reverie by Miss Saidie, who came in with a lighted lamp in her hand.

        "Don't you need a light, Maria? I never could abide to sit in the dark."

        "Oh, yes; bring it in. There, put it on the bureau and sit down by the fire, for I want to talk to you. No, I'm not a bit tired; I am only trying to fit myself again in this room. Why, I don't believe you've changed a pin in the pincushion since I went away."

        Miss Saidie dusted the top of the bureau with her apron before she placed the tall glass lamp upon it.

        "Thar warn't anybody to stay in it," she answered, as she sat down in a deep, cretonne-covered chair and pushed back the hickory log with her foot. "I declare, Maria, I don't see what you want to traipse around with that little poor-folksy yaller dog for. He puts me in mind of the one that old blind nigger up the road used to have."

        "Does he?" asked Maria absently, in the voice of one whose thoughts are hopelessly astray.

        She was standing by the window, holding aside the curtain of flowered chintz, and after a moment she added curiously: "There's a light in the fields, Aunt Saidie. What does it mean?"

        Crossing the room, Miss Saidie followed the gesture with which Maria pointed into the night.

        "That's on the Blake place," she said; "it must be Mr. Christopher moving about with his lantern."

        "You call him Mr. Christopher?"

        "Oh, it slipped out. His father's name was Christopher before him, and I used to open the gate for him when I was a child. Many and many a time the old gentleman's given me candy out of his pocket, or a quarter to buy a present, and one Christmas he brought me a real wax doll from the city. He wasn't old then, I can tell you, and he was as handsome as if he had stepped out of a fashion plate. Why, young Mr. Christopher can't hold a candle to him for looks."

        "He was a gentleman, then? I mean the old man."

        "Who? Mr. Christopher's father? I don't reckon thar was a freer or a finer between here and London."

        Maria's gaze was still on the point of light which twinkled faintly here and there in the distant field.

        "Then how, in heaven's name, did he come to this?" she asked, in a voice that was hardly louder than a whisper.

        "I never knew; I never knew," protested Miss Saidie, going back to her chair beside the hearth. "Brother Bill and he hate each other worse than death, and it was Will's fancy for Mr. Christopher that brought on this awful trouble. For a time, I declare it looked as if the boy was really bewitched, and they were together morning, noon, and night. Your grandpa never got over it, and I believe he blames Mr. Christopher for every last thing that's happened - Molly Peterkin and all."

        "Molly Peterkin?" repeated Maria inquiringly.

        " Why, how absurd! And, after all, what is the matter with the girl?" Dropping the curtain, she came over to the fire, and sat listening attentively while Miss

Saidie told, in spasmodic jerks and pauses, the foolish story of Will's marriage.

        "Your grandpa will never forgive him - never, never. He has turned him out for good and all, and he talks now of leaving every cent of his money to foreign missions."

        "Well, we'll see," said Maria soothingly. "I'll go over there to-morrow and talk with Will, and then I'll try to bring grandfather to some kind of reason. He can't let them starve, rich as he is, there's no sense in that - and if the worst comes, I can at least share the little I have with them. It may supply them with bread, if Molly will undertake to churn her own butter."

        "Then your money went, too?"

        "The greater part of it. Jack was fond of wild schemes, you know. I left it in his hands."

        She had pronounced the dead man's name so composedly that Miss Saidie, after an instant's hesitation, brought herself to an allusion to the girl's loss.

        "How you must miss him, dear," she ventured timidly; "even if he wasn't everything he should have been to you, he was still your husband."

        "Yes, he was my husband," assented Maria quietly.

        "You were so brave and so patient, and you stuck by him to the last, as a wife ought to do. Then thar's not even a child left to you now."

        Maria turned slowly toward her and then looked away again into the fire. The charred end of a lightwood knot had fallen on the stones, and, picking it up, she threw it back into the flames. "For a year

before his death his mind was quite gone," she said in a voice that quivered slightly; "he had to be taken to an asylum, but I went with him and nursed him till he died. There were times when he would allow no one else to enter his room or even bring him his meals. I have sat by him for two days and nights without sleeping, and though he did not recognise me, he would not let me stir from my place."

        "And yet he treated you very badly - even his family said so."

        "That is all over now, and we were both to blame. I owed him reparation, and I made it, thank God, at the last."

        As she raised her bare arms to the cushioned back of her chair Miss Saidie caught a glimpse of a deep white scar which ran in a jagged line above her elbow.

        "Oh, it is nothing, nothing," said Maria hastily, clasping her hands again upon her knees. "That part of my life is over and done with and may rest in peace. I forgave him then, and he forgives me now. One always forgives when one understands, you know, and we both understand to-day - he no less than I. The chief thing was that we made a huge, irretrievable mistake - the mistake that two people make when they think that love can be coddled and nursed like a domestic pet - when they forget that it goes wild and free and comes at no man's call. Folly like that is its own punishment, I suppose."

        "My dear, my dear," gasped Miss Saidie, in awe-stricken sympathy before the wild remorse in Maria's voice.

        "I did my duty, as you call it; I even clung to it desperately, and, much as I hated it, I never rebelled

for a single instant. The nearest I came to loving him, I think, was when, after our terrible life together, he lay helpless for a year and I was with him day and night. If I could have given him my strength then, brain and body, I would have done it gladly, and that agonised compassion was the strongest feeling I ever had for him." She broke off for a long breath, and sat looking earnestly at the amazed little woman across from her. "You could never understand!" she exclaimed impetuously, "but I must tell you - I must tell you because I can't live with you day after day and know that there is an old dead lie between us. I hate lies, I have had so many of them, and I shall speak the truth hereafter, no matter what comes of it. Anything is better than a long, wearing falsehood, or than those hideous little shams that we were always afraid to touch for fear they would melt and show us our own nakedness. That is what I loathe about my life, and that is what I've done with now forever. I am myself now for the first time since I was born, and at last I shall let my own nature teach me how to live."

        Her intense pallor was illumined suddenly by a white flame, whether from the leaping of some inner emotion or from the sinking firelight which blazed up fitfully Miss Saidie could not tell. As she turned her head with an impatient movement her black hair slipped its heavy coil and spread in a shadowy mass upon her bared shoulders.

        "I'm sure I don't know how it is," said Miss Saidie, wiping her eyes. "But I can't see that it makes any difference whether you were what they call in love or not, so long as you were a good,

well-behaved wife. I don't think a man troubles himself much about a woman's heart after he's put his wedding ring on her finger; and though I know, of course, that thar's a lot of nonsense spoken in courtship, it seems to me they mostly take it out in talking. The wives that I've seen are generally as anxious about thar setting hens as they are about thar husband's hearts, and I reckon things are mighty near the same the world over."

        Without noticing her, Maria went on feverishly, speaking so low at times that the other almost lost the words.

        "It is such a relief to let it all out," she said, with a long, sighing breath, "and oh! if I had loved him it would have been so different - so different. Then I might have saved him; for what evil is strong enough to contend against a love which would have borne all things, have covered all things?"

        Rising from her chair, she walked rapidly up and down, and pausing at last beside the window, lifted the curtain and looked out into the night.

        "I might have saved him; I know it now," she repeated slowly: "or had it been otherwise, even in madness I would not have loosened my arms, and my service would have been the one passionate delight left in my life. They could never have torn him from my bosom then, and yet as it was - as it was - " She turned quickly, and, coming back, laid her hand on Miss Saidie's arm. "It is such a comfort to talk, dear Aunt Saidie," she added, "even though you don't understand half that I say. But you are good - so good; and now if you'll

lend me a nightgown I'll go to bed and sleep until my trunks come in the morning."

        Her voice had regained its old composure, and Miss Saidie, looking back as she went for the gown, saw that she had begun quietly to braid her hair.

CHAPTER III
THE DAY AFTERWARD

        Going down a few moments later, she found that breakfast was already over, and that Miss Saidie was washing the tea things at the head of the bared table.

        "Why, it seems but a moment since I fell asleep,"

said Maria, as she drew back her chair. "How long has grandfather been up?"

        "Since before daybreak. He is just starting to town, and he's in a terrible temper because the last batch of butter ain't up to the mark, he says. I'm sure I don't see why it ain't, for I worked every pound of it with my own hands - but thar ain't no rule for pleasing men, and never will be till God Almighty sets the universe rolling upside down. That's the wagon you hear now. Thank heaven, he won't be back till after dark."

        With a gesture of relief Maria applied herself to the buttered waffles before her, prepared evidently in her honour, and then after a short silence, in which she appeared to weigh carefully her unuttered words, she announced her intention of paying immediately her visit to Will and Molly.

        "Oh, you can't, you can't," groaned Miss Saidie, nervously mopping out the inside of a cup. "For heaven's sake, don't raise another cloud of dust jest as we're beginning to see clear again."

        "Now don't tell me I can't when I must," responded Maria, pushing away her plate and rising from the table; "there's no such word as 'can't' when one has to, you know. I'll be back in two hours at the most, and oh! with so much to tell you!"

        After tying on her hat in the hall, she looked in again to lighten Miss Saidie's foreboding by a tempting bait of news; but when she had descended the steps and walked slowly along the drive under the oaks, the assumed brightness of her look faded as rapidly as the morning sunshine on the clay road before her. It was almost with dismay that she

found herself covering the ground between the Hall and Will's home and saw the shaded lane stretching to the little farm adjoining Sol Peterkin's.

        As she passed the store, Mrs. Spade, who was selling white china buttons to Eliza Field, leaned over the counter and stared in amazement through the open window.

        "Bless my soul an' body, if thar ain't old Fletcher's granddaughter come back!" she exclaimed - "holdin' her head as high as ever, jest as if her husband hadn't beat her black an' blue. Well, well, times have slid down hill sence I was a gal, an' the women of to-day ain't got the modesty they used to be born with. Why, I remember the time when old Mrs. Beale in the next county used to go to bed for shame, with a mustard plaster, every time her husband took a drop too much, which he did every blessed Saturday that he lived. It tided him over the Sabbath mighty well, he used to say, for he never could abide the sermons of Mr. Grant."

        Eliza dropped the buttons she had picked up and turned, craning her neck in the direction of Maria's vanishing figure.

        "What on earth has she gone down Sol Peterkin's lane for?" she inquired suspiciously.

        "The Lord knows; if it's to visit her brother, I may say it's a long ways mo'n I'd do."

        "She was always a queer gal even befo' her marriage - so strange an' far-away lookin' that I declar' it used to scare me half to death to meet her all alone at dusk. I never could help feelin' that she could bewitch a body, if she wanted to, with those solemn black eyes."

        "She ain't bewitched me," returned Mrs. Spade decisively; "an' what's mo', she's had too many misfortunes come to her to make me believe she ain't done somethin' to deserve 'em. Thar's mighty few folks gets worse than they deserve in this world, an' when you see a whole flock of troubles settle on a person's head you may rest right sartain thar's a long score of misbehaviours up agin 'em. Yes, ma'am; when I hear of a big misfortune happenin' to anybody that I know, the first question that pops into my head is: 'I wonder if they've broke the sixth this time or jest the common seventh?' The best rule to follow, accordin' to my way of thinkin', is to make up yo' mind right firm that no matter what evil falls upon a person it ain't nearly so bad as the good Lord ought to have made it."

        "That's a real pious way of lookin' at things, I reckon," sighed Eliza deferentially, as she fished five cents from the deep pocket of her purple calico and slapped it down upon the counter; " but we ain't all such good church-goers as you, the mo's the pity."

        "Oh, I'm moral, an' I make no secret of it," replied Mrs. Spade. "It's writ plain all over me, an' it has been ever sence the day that I was born. 'That's as moral lookin' a baby as ever I saw,' was what Doctor Pierson said to ma when I wan't mo'n two hours old. It was so then, an' it's been so ever sence. 'Virtue may not take the place of beaux,' my po' ma used to say, 'but it will ease her along mighty well without 'em' - Yes, the buttons are five cents. To be sure, I'll watch out and let you hear if she comes this way again."

        Maria, meanwhile, happily unconscious of the judgment of her neighbours, walked thoughtfully along the lane until she came in sight of the small tumbled-down cottage which had been Fletcher's wedding gift to his grandson. A man in blue jean clothes was ploughing the field on the left of the road, and it was only when something vaguely familiar in his dejected attitude caused her to turn for a second glance that she realised, with a pang, that he was Will.

        At her startled cry he looked up from the horses he was driving, and then, letting the ropes fall, came slowly toward her across the faint purple furrows. All the boyish jauntiness she remembered was gone from his appearance; his reversion to the family type had been complete, and it came to her with a shock that held her motionless that he stood to-day where her grandfather had stood fifty years before.

        "Will!" she gasped, with an impulsive, motherly movement of her arms. Rejecting her caress with an impatient shrug, he stood kicking nervously at a clod of earth, his eyes wavering in a dispirited survey of her face.

        "Well, it seems that we have both made a blamed mess of things," he said at last.

        Maria shook her head, smiling hopefully. "Not too bad a mess to straighten out, dear," she answered. "We must set to work at once and begin to mend matters. Ah, if you had only written me how things were!"

        "What was the use?" asked Will doggedly. "It was all grandpa - he turned out the devil himself,

and there was no putting up with him. He'll live forever, too; that's the worst of it!"

        "But you did anger him very much, Will - and you might so easily have waited. Surely, you were both young enough."

        "Oh, it wasn't all about Molly, you know, when it comes to that. Long before I married he had made my life a burden to me. It all began with his insane jealousy of Christopher Blake - "

        "Of Christopher Blake?" repeated Maria, and fell a step away from him.

        "Blake has been a deuced good friend to me," insisted Will; "that's what the old man hates - what he's hated steadily all along. The whole trouble started when I wouldn't choose my friends to please him; and when at last I undertook to pick out my own wife there was hell to pay."

        Maria's gaze wandered inquiringly in the direction of the house, which had a disordered and thriftless air.

        "Is she here?" she asked, not without a slight nervousness in her voice.

        Will followed her glance, and, taking off his big straw hat, pulled at the shoestring tied tightly around the crown.

        "Not now; but you'll see her some day, when she's dressed up, and I tell you she'll be worth your looking at. All she needs is a little money to turn her into the most tearing beauty you ever saw."

        "And she's not at home?"

        "Not now," he replied impatiently; "her mother has just come over and taken her off. I say, Maria," he lowered his voice, and an eager look came into

his irresolute face, which already showed the effects of heavy drinking, "this can't keep up, you know; it really can't. We must have money, for there's a child coming in the autumn."

        "A child!" exclaimed Maria, startled. "Oh, Will! Will!" She glanced round again at the barren landscape and the squalid little house; "then something must be done at once - there's no time to lose. I'll speak to grandfather about it this very night."

        "At least, there's no harm in trying," said Will catching desperately at the suggestion. "Even if you don't make things better, there's a kind of comfort in the thought that you can't make them worse. We're at the bottom of the hill already. So, if you don't pull us up, at least you won't push us any farther down."

        "Oh, I'll pull you up, never fear; but you must give me time."

        "Your own affairs are in rather a muddle, I reckon by now?"

        "Hopeless, it seems; but I'll share with you the few hundreds I still have. I brought this to-day thinking you might be in immediate need."

        As she drew the little roll of bills from her pocket, Will reached out eagerly, and, seizing it from her counted it greedily in her presence. "Well, you're a downright brick, Maria," he remarked, as he thrust it hastily into his shirt.

        Disappointment had chilled Maria's enthusiasm a little, but the next instant she dismissed the feeling as ungenerous, and slipped her hand affectionately through his arm as he walked back with her into the road.

        "I wish I could see Molly," she said again, her eyes on the house, where she caught a glimpse of a bright head withdrawn from one of the windows.

        "She is over at her mother's, I told you," returned Will irritably, and then, stooping to kiss her hurriedly, he added in a persuasive voice: "Bring the old man to reason, Maria; it's life or death, remember."

        "I'll do my best, Will; I'll go on my knees to him to-night."

        "Does he dislike you as much as ever?"

        "No; he rather fancies me, I think. Last evening he grew almost amiable, and this morning Aunt Saidie told me he left me a pound of fresh butter from the market jar. If you only knew how fond he's grown of his money you would realise what it means.'

        "Well, keep it up, for God's sake. Humour him for all he's worth. Coddle and coax him into doing something for us, or dying and leaving us his money."

        Maria's face grew grave. "That's the serious part, Will; he talks of leaving every penny he has to foreign missions."

        "The devil!" cried Will furiously. "If he does, I hope he'll land in hell. Don't let him, Maria. It all rests with you. Why, if he did, you'd starve along with us, wouldn't you?"

        "Oh, you needn't think of me - I could always teach, you know, and a little money buys a great deal of happiness with me. I have learned that great wealth is almost as much of an evil as great poverty."

        "I'd take the risk of it, every time; and he is beastly rich, isn't he, Maria?"

        "One of the very richest men in the State, they told me at the cross-roads."

        "Yet he has the insolence to cut me off without a dollar. Look at this petered-out little farm he's given me. Why, it doesn't bring in enough to feed a darkey!"

        "We'll hope for better things, dear; but you must learn to be patient - very patient. His anger has been smothered so long that it has grown almost as settled as hate. Aunt Saidie doesn't dare mention your name to him, and she tells me that if I so much as speak of you he'll turn me out of doors."

        "Then it's even worse than I thought."

        "Perhaps. I can't say, for I haven't approached the subject even remotely as yet. Keep your courage, however, and I promise you to do my best."

        She kissed him again, and then, turning her face homeward, started at a rapid walk down the lane. The interview with Will had disturbed her more than she liked to admit, and it was with a positive throb of pain that she forced herself at last to compare the boy of five years ago with the broken and dispirited man from whom she had just parted. Was this tragedy the end of the young ambition which Fletcher had nursed so fondly, this - a nervous, overworked tobacco-grower, with bloodshot eyes, and features already inflamed by reckless drinking? The tears sprang to her lashes, and, throwing up her hands with a pathetic gesture of protest, she hastened on homeward as if to escape the terror that pursued her.

        She had turned from the lane into the main road, and was just approaching the great chestnuts which

grew near the abandoned ice-pond, when, looking up suddenly at the call of a bird above her head, she saw Christopher Blake standing beside the rail fence and watching her with a strong and steady gaze. Involuntarily she slackened her pace and waited, smiling for him to cross the fence; but, to her amazement, after an instant in which his eyes held her as if rooted to the spot, he turned hastily away and walked rapidly in the opposite direction. For a breath she stood motionless, gazing blankly into space; then, as she went on again, she knew that she carried with her not the wonder at his sudden flight, but the clear memory of that one moment's look into his eyes. A century of experience, with its tears and its laughter, its joy and its anguish, its desire and its fulfilment, seemed crowded into the single instant that held her immovable in the road.

CHAPTER IV
THE MEETING IN THE NIGHT

        Between regret and perplexity the day dragged through, and he met his mother's exacting humours and Cynthia's wistful inquiries with a curious detachment of mind. He had reached that middle state of any powerful emotion when even the external objects among which one moves seem affected by the inward struggle between reason and desire - the field in which he worked, the distant landscape the familiar faces in the house, and those frail pathetic gestures of his mother's hands, all expressed in outward forms something of the passion which he felt stirring in his own breast. It was in his nature to dare risks blindly - to hesitate at no experience offered him in his narrow life, and there were moments during this long day when he found himself questioning if one might not, after all, plunge headlong into the impossible.

        As he rose from the supper table, where he had pushed his untasted food impatiently away, he remembered that he had promised in the morning to meet Will Fletcher at the store, and, lighting his lantern, he started out to keep the appointment he had almost forgotten. He found Will overflowing with his domestic troubles, and it was after ten o'clock before they both came out upon the road and turned into opposite ways at the beginning of Sol Peterkin's lane.

        "I'll help you with the ploughing, of course," Christopher said, as they lingered together a moment before parting; "make your mind quite easy about that. I'll be over at sunrise on Monday and put in a whole day's job."

        Then, as he fell back into his own road, he found something like satisfaction in the prospect of driving Will Fletcher's plough. The easy indifference with which he was accustomed to lend a hand in a neighbour's difficulty had always marked his association with the man whose ruin, he still assured himself, he had wrought.

        It was a dark, moonless night, with only a faint, nebulous whiteness where the clouded stars shone overhead. His lantern, swinging lightly from his hand, cast a shining yellow circle on the ground before him, and it was by this illumination that he

saw presently, as he neared the sunken road into which he was about to turn, a portion of the shadow by the ice-pond detach itself from the surrounding blackness and drift rapidly to meet him. In his first start of surprise, he raised the lantern quickly above his head and waited breathlessly while the advancing shape assumed gradually a woman's form. The old ghost stories of his childhood thronged confusedly into his brain, and then, before the thrilling certainty of the figure before him, he uttered a single joyous exclamation:

        "You!"

        The light flashed full upon Maria's face, which gave back to him a white and tired look. Her eyes were heavy, and there was a strange solemnity about them - something that appealed vaguely to his religious instinct.

        "What in heaven's name has happened?" he asked, and his voice escaped his control and trembled with emotion.

        With a tired little laugh, she screened her eyes from the lantern.

        "I had a talk with grandfather about Will," she answered, "and he got so angry that he locked me out of doors. He had had a worrying day in town, and I think he hardly knew what he was doing - but he has put up the bars and turned out the lights, and there's really no way of getting in."

        He thought for a moment. "Will you go on to your brother's, or is it too far?"

        "At first I started there, but that must have been hours ago, and it was so dark I got lost by the ice-pond. After all, it would only make matters

worse if I saw Will again; so the question is, Where am I to sleep?"

        "At Tom Spade's, then - or - " he hesitated an instant, "if you care to come to us, my sister will gladly find room for you."

        She shook her head. "No, no; you are very kind, but I can't do that. It is best that I shouldn't leave the place, perhaps, and when the servant comes over at sunrise I can slip up into my room. If you'll lend me your lantern I'll make myself some kind of a bed in the barn. Fortunately, grandfather forgot to lock the door."

        "In the barn?" he echoed, surprised.

        "Oh, I went there first, but after I lay down I suddenly remembered the mice and got up and came away. I'm mortally afraid of mice in the dark; but your lantern will keep them off, will it not?"

        She smiled at him from the shining circle which surrounded her like a halo, and for a moment he forgot her words in the wonderful sense of her nearness. Around them the night stretched like a cloak, enclosing them in an emotional intimacy which had all the warmth of a caress. As she leaned back against the body of a tree, and he drew forward that he might hold the lantern above her head, the situation was resolved, in spite of the effort that he made, into the eternal problem of the man and the woman. He was aware that his blood worked rapidly in his veins, and as her glance reached upward from the light to meet his in the shadow he realised with the swiftness of intuition that in her also the appeal of the silence was faced with a struggle. They would ignore it, he knew, and yet it shone in

their eyes, quivered in their voices, and trembled in their divided hands; and to them both its presence was alive and evident in the space between them. He saw her bosom rise and fall, her lips part slightly, and a tremor disturb the high serenity of her self-control, and there came to him the memory of their first meeting at the cross-roads and of the mystery and the rapture of his boyish love. He had found her then the lady of his dreams, and now, after all the violence of his revolt against her, she was still to him as he had first seen her - the woman whose soul looked at him from her face.

        For a breathless moment - for a single heart-beat - it seemed to him that he had but to lean down and gather her eyes and lips and hands to his embrace, to feel her awaken to life within his arms and her warm blood leap up beneath his mouth. Then the madness left him as suddenly as it had come, and she grew strangely white, and distant, and almost unreal, in the spiritual beauty of her look. He caught his breath sharply, and lowered his gaze to the yellow circle that trembled on the ground.

        "But you will be afraid even with the light," he said, in a voice which had grown almost expressionless.

        As if awaking suddenly from sleep, she passed her hand slowly across her eyes.

        "No, I shall not be afraid with the light," she answered, and moved out into the road.

        "Then let me hold it for you - the hill is very rocky."

        She assented silently, and quickened her steps down the long incline; then, as she stumbled in the darkness, he threw the lantern over upon her side.

        "If you will lean on me I think I can steady you," he suggested, waiting until she turned and laid her hand upon his arm. "That's better now; go slowly and leave the road to me. How in thunder did you come over it in the pitch dark?"

        "I fell several times," she replied, with a little unsteady laugh, "and my feet are oh! so hurt and bruised. To-morrow I shall go on crutches."

        "A bad night's work, then."

        "But not so bad as it might have been," she added cheerfully.

        "You mean if I had not found you it would have been worse. Well, I'm glad that much good has come out of it. I have spared you a cold - so that goes down to my credit; otherwise - But what difference does it make?" he finished impatiently. "We must have met sooner or later even if I had run across the world instead of merely across a tobacco field. After all, the world is no bigger than a tobacco field, when it comes to destiny."

        "To destiny?" she looked up, startled. "Then there are fatalists even among tobacco-growers?"

        He met her question with a laugh. "But I wasn't always a tobacco-grower, and there were poets before Homer, who is about the only one I've ever read. It's true I've tried to lose the little education I ever had - that I've done my best to come down to the level of my own cattle; but I'm not an ox, after all, except in strength, and one has plenty of time to think when one works in the field all day. Why, the fancies I've had would positively turn your head."

        "Fancies - about what?"

        "About life and death and the things one wants and can never get. I dream dreams and plot unimaginable evil - "

        "Not evil," she protested.

        "Whole crops of it; and harvest them, too."

        "But why?"

        "For pure pleasure - for sheer beastly love of the devilment I can't do."

        She shook her head, treating his words as a jest.

        "There was never evil that held its head so high."

        "That's pride, you know."

        "Nor that wore so frank a face."

        "And that's hypocrisy."

        "Nor that dared to be so rude."

        He caught up her laugh.

        "You have me there, I grant you. What a brute I must have seemed this morning."

        "You were certainly not a Chesterfield - nor a Bolivar Blake."

        With a start he looked down upon her. "Then you, too, are aware of the old chap?" he asked.

        "Of Bolivar Blake - why, who isn't? I used to be taught one of his maxims as a child - 'If you can't tell a polite lie, don't tell any.' "

        "Good manners, but rather bad morality, eh?" he inquired.

        "Unfortunately, the two things seem to run together," she replied; "which encourages me to hope that you will prove to be a pattern of virtue."

        "Don't hope too hard. I may merely have lost the one trait without developing the other."

        "At least, it does no harm to believe the best," she returned in the same careless tone.

        Ahead of them, where the great oaks were massed darkly against the sky, he saw the steep road splotched into the surrounding blackness. Her soft breathing came to him from the obscurity at his side, and he felt his arm burn beneath the light pressure of her hand. For the first time in his lonely and isolated life he knew the quickened emotion, the fulness of experience, which came to him with the touch of the woman whom, he still told himself, he could never love. Not to love her had been so long for him a point of pride as well as of honour that even while the wonderful glow pervaded his thoughts, while his pulses drummed madly in his temples, he held himself doggedly to the illusion that the appeal she made would vanish with the morning. It was a delirium of the senses, he still reasoned, and knew even as the lie was spoken that the charm which drew him to her was, above all things, the spirit speaking through the flesh.

        "I fear I have been a great bother to you," said Maria, after a moment, "but you will probably solace yourself with the reflection that destiny would have prepared an equal nuisance had you gone along another road."

        "Perhaps," he answered, smiling; "but philosophy sometimes fails a body, doesn't it?"

        "It may be. I knew a man once who said he leaned upon two crutches, philosophy and religion. When one broke under him he threw his whole weight on the other - and lo! that gave way."

        "Then he went down, I suppose."

        "I never heard the end - but if it wasn't quite so dark, you would find me really covered with confusion.

I have not only brought you a good mile out of your road, but I am now prepared to rob you of your light. Can you possibly find your way home in the dark?"

        As she looked up, the lantern shone in his face, and she saw that he wore a whimsical smile.

        "I have been in the dark all my life," he answered, "until to-night."

        "Until to-night?"

        "Until now - this very minute. For the first time for ten years I begin to see my road at this instant - to see where I have been walking all along."

        "And where did it lead you?"

        He laughed at the seriousness in her voice.

        "Through a muck-heap - in the steps of my own cattle. I am sunk over the neck in it already."

        Her tone caught the lightness of his and carried it off with gaiety.

        "But there is a way out. Have you found it?"

        "There is none. I've wallowed so long in the filth that it has covered me."

        "Surely it will rub off," she said.

        For a moment the lantern's flash rested upon his brow and eyes, relieving them against the obscurity which still enveloped his mouth.

        The high-bred lines of his profile stood out clear and fine as those of an ivory carving, and their very beauty saddened the look she turned upon him. Then the light fell suddenly lower and revealed the coarsened jaw, with the almost insolent strength of the closed lips. The whole effect was one of reckless power, and she caught her breath with the

thought that so compelling a force might serve equally the agencies of good or evil.

        They had reached the lawn, and as he responded to her hurried gesture of silence they passed the house quickly and entered the great open door of the barn. Here he hung the lantern from a nail, and then, pulling down some straw from a pile in one corner, arranged it into the rude likeness of a pallet.

        "I don't think the mice will trouble you," he said at last, as he turned to go, "but if they do - why, just call out and I'll come to slaughter - "

        "You won't go home, then?" she asked, amazed.

        He nodded carelessly.

        "Not till daybreak. Remember, if you feel frightened, that I'm within earshot.'

        Then, before she could protest or detain him for an explanation, he turned from her and went out into the darkness.

CHAPTER V
MARIA STANDS ON CHRISTOPHER'S GROUND

        Meeting Fletcher a little later at breakfast, she found, to her surprise, that he accepted her presence without question and made absolutely no allusion to the heated conversation of the evening before. He looked sullen and dirty, as if he had slept all night in his clothes, and he responded to Maria's few good-humoured remarks with a single abrupt nod over his coffee-cup. As she watched him a feeling of pity for his loneliness moved her heart, and when he rose hastily at last and strode out into the hall she followed him and spoke gently while he paused

to take down his hat from one of the old antlers near the door.

        "If I could only be of some use to you, grandfather," she said; "are you sure there is nothing I can do?"

        With his hand still outstretched, he hesitated an instant and stood looking down upon her, his heavy features wrinkling into a grin.

        "I've nothing against you as a woman," he responded, "but when you set up and begin to charge like a judge, I'll be hanged if I can stand you."

        "Then I won't charge any more. I only want to help you and to do what is best. If you would but let me make myself of some account."

        He laughed not unkindly, and flecked with his stubby forefinger at some crumbs which had lodged in the folds of his cravat.

        "Then I reckon you'd better mix a batch of dough and feed the turkeys," he replied, and touching her shoulder with his hat-brim, he went hurriedly out of doors.

        When he had disappeared beyond the last clump of shrubbery bordering the drive, she remembered the lantern she had left hanging in the barn, and, going to look for it, carried it upstairs to her room. In the afternoon, however, it occurred to her that Christopher would probably need the light by evening, and swinging the handle over her arm, she set out across the newly ploughed fields toward the Blake cottage. The stubborn rustic pride which would keep him from returning to the Hall aroused in her a frank, almost tender amusement. She had long ago wearied of the trivial worldliness of

life; in the last few years the shallowness of passion had seemed its crowning insult, and over the absolute sincerity of her own nature the primal emotion she had heard in Christopher's voice exerted a compelling charm. The makeshift of a conventional marriage had failed her utterly; her soul had rejected the woman's usual cheap compromise with externals; and in her almost puritan scorn of the vanities by which she was surrounded she had attained the moral elevation which comes to those who live by an inner standard of purity rather than by outward forms. In the largeness of her nature there had been small room for regret or for wasted passion, and until her meeting with Christopher on the day of her homecoming he had existed in her imagination only as a bright and impossible memory. Now, as she went rapidly forward along the little path that edged the field, she found herself wondering if, after all, she had worn unconsciously his ideal as an armour against the petty temptations and the sudden melancholies of the last six years.

        As she neared the fence that divided the two farms she saw him walking slowly along a newly turned furrow, and when he looked up she lifted the lantern and waved it in the air. Quickening his steps, he swung himself over the rail fence with a single bound, and came to where she stood amid a dried fringe of last summer's yarrow.

        "So you are none the worse for the night in the barn?" he asked anxiously.

        "Why, I dreamed the most beautiful dreams," she replied, "and I had the most perfect sleep in the world."

        "Then the mice kept away?"

        "At least they didn't wake me."

        "I stayed within call until sunrise," he said quietly. "You were not afraid?"

        Her rare smile shone suddenly upon him, illumining the delicate pallor of her face. "I knew that you were there," she answered.

        For a moment he gazed steadily into her eyes, then with a decisive movement he took the lantern from her hand and turned as though about to go back to his work.

        "It was very kind of you to bring this over," he said, pausing beside the fence.

        "Kind? Why, what did you expect? I knew it might hang there forever, but you would not come for it."

        "No, I should not have come for it," he replied, swinging the lantern against the rails with such force that the glass shattered and fell in pieces to the ground.

        "Why, what a shame!" said Maria; "and it is all my fault."

        A smile was on his face as he looked at her.

        "You are right - it is all your fault," he repeated, while his gaze dropped to the level of her lips and hung there for a breathless instant.

        With an effort she broke the spell which had fallen over her, and, turning from him, pointed to the old Blake graveyard on the little hill.

        "Those black cedars have tempted me for days," she said. "Will you tell me what dust they guard so faithfully?"

        He followed her gesture with a frown.

        "I will show you, if you like," he answered. "It is the only spot on earth where I may offer you hospitality."

        "Your people are buried there?"

        "For two hundred years. Will you come?" While she hesitated, he tossed the lantern over into his field and came closer to her side. "Come," he repeated gently, and at his voice a faint flush spread slowly from her throat to the loosened hair upon her forehead. The steady glow gave her face a light, a radiance, that he had never seen there until to-day.

        "Yes, I will come if you wish it," she responded quietly.

        Together they went slowly up the low, brown incline over the clods of upturned earth. When they reached the bricked-up wall, which had crumbled away in places, he climbed over into the bed of periwinkle and then held out his hands to assist her in descending. "Here, step into that hollow," he said, "and don't jump till I tell you. Ah, that's it; now, I'm ready."

        At his words, she made a sudden spring forward her dress caught on the wall, and she slipped lightly into his outstretched arms. For the half of a second he held her against his breast; then, as she released herself, he drew back and lifted his eyes to meet the serene composure of her expression. He was conscious that his own face flamed red hot, but to all outward seeming she had not noticed the incident which had so moved him. The calm distinction of her bearing struck him as forcibly as it had done at their first meeting.

        "What a solemn place," she said, lowering her voice as she looked about her.

        For answer he drew aside the screening boughs of a cedar and motioned to the discoloured marble slabs strewn thickly under the trees.

        "Here are my people," he returned gravely. "And here is my ground."

        Pausing, she glanced down on his father's grave, reading with difficulty the inscription beneath the dry dust from the cedars.

        "He lived to be very old," she said, after a moment.

        "Seventy years. He lived exactly ten years too long."

        "Too long?"

        "Those last ten years wrecked him. Had he died at sixty he would have died happy."

        He turned from her, throwing himself upon the carpet of periwinkle, and coming to where he lay, she sat down on a granite slab at his side.

        "One must believe that there is a purpose in it," she responded, raising a handful of fine dust and sifting it through her fingers, "or one would go mad over the mystery of things."

        "Well, I dare say the purpose was to make me a tobacco-grower," he replied grimly, "and if so, it has fulfilled itself in a precious way. Why, there's never been a time since I was ten years old when I wouldn't have changed places, and said 'thank you,' too, with any one of those old fellows over there. They were jolly chaps, I tell you, and led jolly lives. It used to be said of them that they never won a penny nor missed a kiss."

        "Nor learned a lesson, evidently. Well, may they rest in peace; but I'm not sure that their wisdom would carry far. There are better things than gaming and kissing, when all is said."

        "Better things? Perhaps."

        "Have you not found them?"

        "Not yet; but then, I can't judge anything except tobacco, you know."

        For a long pause she looked down into his upturned face.

        "After all, it isn't the way we live nor the work we do that matters," she said slowly, "but the ideal we put into it. Is there any work too sordid, too prosaic, to yield a return of beauty?"

        "Do you think so?" he asked, and glanced down the hill to his ploughshare lying in the ripped-up field. "But it is not beauty that some of us want, you see - it's success, action, happiness, call it what you will."

        "Surely they are not the same. I have known many successful people, and the only three perfectly happy ones I ever met were what the world calls failures."

        "Failures?" he echoed, and remembered Tucker.

        Her face softened, and she looked beyond him to the blue sky, shining through the interlacing branches of bared trees.

        "Two were women," she pursued, clasping and unclasping the quiet hands in her lap, "and one was a Catholic priest who had been reared in a foundling asylum and educated by charity. When I knew him he was on his way to a leper island in the South Seas, where he would

be buried alive for the remainder of his life. All he had was an ideal, but it flooded his soul with light. Another was a Russian Nihilist, a girl in years and yet an atheist and a revolutionist in thought, and her unbelief was in its way as beautiful as the religion of my priest. To return to Russia meant death; she knew, and yet she went back, devoted and exalted, to lay down her life for an illusion. So it seems, when one looks about the world, that faith and doubt are dry and inanimate forms until we pour forth our heart's blood, which vivifies them."

        She fell silent, and he started and touched softly the hem of her black skirt.

        "And the other?" he asked.

        "The other had a stranger and a longer story, but if you will listen I'll tell it to you. She was an Italian, of a very old and proud family, and as she possessed rare loveliness and charm, a marriage was arranged for her with a wealthy nobleman, who had fallen in love with her before she left her convent. She was a rebellious soul, it seems, for the day before her wedding, just after she had patiently tried on her veil and orange blossoms, she slipped into the dress of her waiting-maid and ran off with a music-teacher - a beggarly fanatic, they told me - a man of red republican views, who put dangerous ideas into the heads of the peasantry. From that moment, they said, her life was over; her family shut their doors upon her, and she fell finally so low as to be seen one evening singing in the public streets. Her story touched me when I heard it: it seemed a pitiable thing that a woman should be wrecked so hopelessly by a single moment of mistaken courage;

and after months of searching I at last found the place she lived in, and went one May evening up the long winding staircase to her apartment - two clean, plain rooms which looked on a little balcony where there were pots of sweet basil and many pigeons. At my knock the door opened, and I knew her at once in the beautiful white face and hands of the woman who stood a little back in the shadow. Her forty years had not coarsened her as they do most Italian women, and her eyes still held the unshaken confidence of extreme youth. Her husband was sleeping in the next room, she said; he had but a few days more to live, and he had been steadily dying for a year. Then, at my gesture of sympathy, she shook her head and smiled.

        " 'I have had twenty years,' she said, 'and I have been perfectly happy. Think of that when so many women die without having even a single day of life. Why, but for the one instant of courage that saved me, I myself might have known the world only as a vegetable knows the garden in which it fattens. My soul has lived, and though I have been hungry and cold and poorly clad, I have never sunk to the level of what they would have made me. He is a dreamer,' she finished gently, 'and though his dreams were nourished upon air, and never came true except in our thoughts, still they have touched even the most common things with beauty.' While she talked, he awoke and called her, and we went in to see him. He complained a little fretfully that his feet were cold, and she knelt down and warmed them in the shawl upon her bosom. The mark of death was on him, and I doubt if even in the fulness of his strength he

were worthy of the passion he inspired - but that, after all, makes little difference. It was a great love, which is the next best thing to a great faith."

        As she ended, he raised his eyes slowly, catching the fervour of her glance.

        "It was more than that - it was a great deliverance," he said.

        Then, as she rose, he followed her from the graveyard, and they descended the low brown hill together.

CHAPTER VI
THE GROWING LIGHT

        "It seems Will met the old man somewhere on the road and they came to downright blows," he said. "Fletcher broke a hickory stick over the boy's shoulders."

        Christopher carefully sorted a pile of plants, and then, selecting the finest six leaves, wrapped them together by means of a smaller one which he twisted tightly about the stems.

        "Ah, is that so?" he returned, with a troubled look.

        "It's a pretty kettle of fish, sure enough," pursued Jim. "Of course, Will has made a fool of himself, and gone to the dogs and all that, but I must say it does seem a shame, where you think that old Fletcher can't take his money with him to the next world.

As for pure stinginess, I don't believe he'd find his match if he scoured the country. Why, they say his granddaughter barely gets enough to eat. Look here! What are you putting in that bad leaf for. It's worm-eaten all over."

        "So it is," admitted Christopher, examining it with a laugh. "My eyesight must be failing me. But what good under heaven does his money do Fletcher, after all?"

        "Oh, he's saving it up to leave to foreign missions, Tom Spade says. Mr. Carraway is coming down next week to draw up a new will."

        "And his grandchildren come in for nothing?"

        "It looks that way - but you can't see through Bill Fletcher, so nobody knows. The funny part is that he has taken rather a liking to Mrs. Wyndham, I hear, and she has even persuaded him to raise the wages of his hands. It's a pity she can't patch up a peace with Will - the quarrel seems to distress her very much."

        "You have seen her, then?"

        "Yesterday, for a minute. She stopped me near the store and asked for news of Will. There was nothing I could tell her except that they dragged along somehow with Sol Peterkin's help. That's a fine woman, Fletcher or no Fletcher."

        "Well, she can't help that - it's merely a question of name. There's Cynthia calling us to dinner. We'll have to fill the hogsheads later on."

        But when the meal was over and he was returning to his work, Cynthia followed him with a message from his mother.

        "She has asked for you all the morning, Christopher;

there's something on her mind, though she seems quite herself and in a very lively humour. It is impossible to get her away from the subject of marriage - she harps on it continually."

        He had turned to enter the house at her first words, but now his face clouded, and he hung back before the door.

        "Do you think I'd better go in?" he asked, hesitating.

        "There's no getting out of it without making her feel neglected, and perhaps your visit may divert her thoughts. I'm sure I don't see what she has left to say on the subject."

        "All right, I'll go," he said cheerfully, "but for heaven's sake, help me drum up some fresh topics."

        Mrs. Blake was sitting up in bed, sipping a glass of port wine, and at Christopher's step she turned her groping gaze helplessly in his direction.

        "What a heavy tramp you have, my son; you must be almost as large as your father."

        Crossing the room as lightly as his rude boots permitted, Christopher stooped to kiss the cheek she held toward him. The old lady had wasted gradually to the shadow of herself, and the firelight from the hearth shone through the unearthly pallor of her face and hands. Her beautiful white hair was still arranged, over a high cushion, in an elaborate fashion, and her gown of fine embroidered linen was pinned together with a delicate cameo brooch.

        "I have been talking very seriously to Lila," she began at once, as he sat down by the bedside. "My age is great, you know, and it is hardly probable that the good Lord will see fit to leave me much

longer to enjoy the pleasures of this world. Now, what troubles me more than all else is that I am to die feeling that the family will pass utterly away. Is it possible that both Lila and yourself persist in your absurd and selfish determination to remain unmarried?"

        "Oh, mother! mother!" groaned Lila from the fireplace.

        "You needn't interrupt me, Lila; you know quite well that a family is looked at askance when all of its members remain single. Surely one old maid - and I am quite reconciled to poor Cynthia's spinsterhood - is enough to leaven things, as your father used to say - "

        Her memory slipped from her for a moment; she caught at it painfully, and a peevish expression crossed her face.

        "What was I saying, Lila? I grow so forgetful."

        "About father, dear."

        "No, no; I remember now - it was about your marrying. Well, well, as I said before, I fear your attitude is the result of some sentimental fancies you have found in books. My child, there was never a book yet that held a sensible view of love, and I hope you will pay no attention to what they say. As for waiting until you can't live without a man before you marry him - tut-tut! the only necessary question is to ascertain if you can possibly live with him. There is a great deal of sentiment talked in life, my dear, and very little lived - and my experience of the world has shown me that one man is likely to make quite as good a husband as another - provided he remains a gentleman and you don't expect him

to become a saint. I've had a long marriage, my children, and a happy one. Your father fell in love with me at his first glance, and he did not hate me at his last, though the period covered an association of thirty years. We were an ideal couple, all things considered, and he was a very devoted husband; but to this day I have not ceased to be thankful that he was never placed in the position where he had to choose between me and his dinner. Honestly, I may as well confess among us three, it makes me nervous when I think of the result of such a pass."

        "Oh, mother," protested Lila reproachfully, "if I listened to you I should never want to marry any man."

        "I'm sure I don't see why, my dear. I have always urged it as a duty, not advised it as a pleasure. As far as that goes, I hold to this day the highest opinion of matrimony and of men, though I admit when I consider the attention they require, I sometimes feel that women might select a better object. When the last word is said, a man is not half so satisfactory a domestic pet as a cat, and far less neat in his habits. Your poor father would throw his cigar ashes on the floor to the day of his death, and I could never persuade him to use an ash-tray, though I gave him one regularly every Christmas that he lived. Do you smoke cigars, Christopher? I detect a strong odour of tobacco about you, and I hope you haven't let Tucker persuade you into using anything so vulgar as a pipe. The worst effect of a war, I am inclined to believe, is the excuse it offers every man who fought in it to fall into bad habits."

        "Oh, it's Uncle Tucker's pipe you smell," replied Christopher, with a laugh, as he rose from his chair. "I detest the stuff and always did."

        "I suppose I ought to be thankful for it," said Mrs. Blake, detaining him by a gesture, "but I can't help recalling a speech of Micajah Blair's, who said that a woman who didn't flirt and a man who didn't smoke were unsexed creatures. It is a commendable eccentricity, I suppose, but an eccentricity, good or bad, is equally to be deplored. Your grandfather always said that the man who was better than his neighbours was quite as unfortunate as the man who was worse. Who knows but that your dislike of tobacco and your aversion to marriage may result from the same peculiar quirk in your brain?"

        "Well, it's there and I can't alter it, even to please you, mother," declared Christopher from the door. "I've set my face square against them both, and there it stands."

        He went out laughing, and Mrs. Blake resigned herself with a sigh to her old port.

        The rain fell heavily, whipping up foaming puddles in the muddy road and beating down the old rosebushes in the yard.

        As Christopher paused for a moment in the doorway before going to the barn he drew with delight the taste of the dampness into his mouth and the odour of the moist earth into his nostrils. The world had taken on a new and appealing beauty, and yet the colourless landscape was touched with a sadness which he had never seen in external things until to-day.

        His ears were now opened suddenly, his eyes

unbandaged, and he heard the rhythmical fall of the rain and saw the charm of the brown fields with a vividness that he had never found in his enjoyment of a summer's day. Human life also moved him to responsive sympathy, and he felt a great aching tenderness for his blind mother and for his sisters with their narrowed and empty lives. His own share in the world, he realized, was but that of a small, insignificant failure; he had been crushed down like a weed in his tobacco field, and for a new springing-up he found neither place nor purpose. The facts of his own life were not altered by so much as a shadow, yet on the outside life that was not his own he beheld a wonderful illumination.

        His powerful figure filled the doorway, and Cynthia coming up behind him, raised herself on tiptoe to touch his bared head.

        "Your hair is quite wet, Christopher; be sure to put on your hat and fasten the oilcloth over your shoulders when you go back to the barn. You are so reckless that you make me uneasy. Why, the rain has soaked entirely through your shirt."

        "Oh, I'm a pine knot; you needn't worry."

        She sighed impatiently and went back to the kitchen, while his gaze travelled slowly along the wet gray road to the abandoned ice-pond, and he thought of his meeting with Maria in the darkness and of the light of the lantern shining on her face. He remembered her white hands against her black dress, her fervent eyes under the grave pallor of her brow, her passionate, kind voice, and her mouth with the faint smile which seemed never to fade utterly away. Love, which is revealed usually as a pleasant

disturbing sentiment resulting from the ordinary purposes of life, had come to him in the form of a great regenerating force, destroying but that it might rebuild anew.

CHAPTER VII
IN WHICH CARRAWAY SPEAKS THE TRUTH TO MARIA

        On the morning after his arrival, Carraway had a long conversation with the old man in his sitting-room, and when it was over he came out with an anxious frown upon his brow and went upstairs to the library which Maria had fitted up in the spare room next her chamber. It was the pleasantest spot in the house, he had concluded last evening, and the impression returned to him as he entered now and saw the light from the wood fire falling on the shining floor, which reflected the stately old furniture, and the cushions, and the window curtains of faded green. Books were everywhere, and he noticed at once that they were not the kind read by the women whom he knew - big leather volumes on philosophy, yellow-covered French novels, and curled edges of what he took to be the classic poets. It was almost with relief that he noticed a dainty feminine touch here and there - a work-bag of flowered silk upon the sofa, a bowl of crocuses among the papers on the old mahogany

desk, and clinging to each bit of well-worn drapery in the room a faint and delicate fragrance.

        Maria was lying drowsily in a low chair before the fire, and as he entered she looked up with a smile and motioned to a comfortable seat across the hearth. A book was on her knees, but she had not been reading, for her fingers were playing carelessly with the uncut leaves. Against her soft black dress the whiteness of her face and hands showed almost too intense a contrast, and yet there was no hint of fragility in her appearance. From head to foot she was abounding with energy, throbbing with life, and though Carraway would still, perhaps, have hesitated to call her beautiful, his eyes dwelt with pleasure on the noble lines of her relaxed figure. Better than beauty, he admitted the moment afterward, was the charm that shone for him in her wonderfully expressive face - a face over which the experiences of many lives seemed to ripple faintly in what was hardly more than the shadow of a smile. She had loved and suffered, he thought, with his gaze upon her, and from both love and suffering she had gained that fulness of nature which is the greatest good that either has to yield.

        "So it is serious," she said anxiously, as he sat down.

        "I fear so - at least, where your brother is concerned. I can't say just what the terms of the will are, of course, but he made no secret at breakfast of his determination to leave half of his property - which the result of recent investments has made very large - to the cause of foreign missions."

        "Yes, he has told me about it."

        "Then there's nothing more to be said, unless you can persuade him for your brother's sake to destroy the will when his anger has blown over. I used every argument I could think of, but he simply wouldn't listen to me - swept my advice aside as if it was so much wasted breath - "

        He paused as Maria bent her ear attentively.

        "He is coming upstairs now!" she exclaimed amazed.

        There was a heavy tread on the staircase, and a little later Fletcher came in and turned to close the door carefully behind him. He had recovered for a moment his air of bluff good-humour, and his face crinkled into a ruddy smile.

        "So you're hatching schemes between you, I reckon," he observed, and, crossing to the hearth pushed back a log with the toe of his heavy boot.

        "It looks that way, certainly," replied Carraway with his pleasant laugh. "But I must confess that I was doing nothing more interesting than admiring Mrs. Wyndham's taste in books."

        Fletcher glanced round indifferently.

        "Well, I haven't any secrets," he pursued, still under the pressure of the thought which had urged him upstairs, "and as far as that goes, I can tear up that piece of paper and have it done with any day I please."

        "So I had the honour to advise," remarked Carraway.

        "That's neither here nor thar, I reckon - it's made now, and so it's likely to stand until I die, though I don't doubt you'll twist and split it then as much as you can. However, I reckon the foreign

missions will look arter the part that goes to them, and if Maria's got the sense I credit her with she'll look arter hers."

        "After mine?" exclaimed Maria, lifting her head to return his gaze. "Why, I thought you gave me my share when I married."

        "So I did - so I did, and you let it slip like water through your fingers; but you've grown up, I reckon, sence you were such a fool as to have your head turned by Wyndham, and if you don't hold on to this tighter than you did to the last you deserve to lose it, that's all. You're a good woman - I ain't lived a month in the house with you and not found that out - but if you hadn't had something more than goodness inside your head you wouldn't have got so much as a cent out of me again. Saidie's a good woman and a blamed fool, too, but you're different; you've got a backbone in your body, and I'll be hanged if that ain't why I'm leaving the Hall to you."

        "The Hall?" echoed Maria, rising impulsively from her chair and facing him upon the hearthrug.

        "The Hall and Saidie and the whole lot," returned Fletcher, chuckling, "and I may as well tell you now, that, for all your spendthrift notions about wages, you're the only woman I ever saw who was fit to own a foot of land. But I like the quiet way you manage things, somehow, and, bless my soul, if you were a man I'd leave you the whole business and let the missions hang."

        "There's time yet," observed Carraway beneath his breath.

        "No, no; it's settled now," returned Fletcher, "and she'll have more than she can handle as it is.

Most likely she'll marry again, being a woman, and a man will be master here, arter all. If you do," he added, turning angrily upon his granddaughter, "for heaven's sakes, don't let it be another precious scamp like your first!"

        With a shiver Maria caught her breath and bent toward him with an appealing gesture of her arms.

        "But you must not do it, grandfather; it isn't right. The place was never meant to belong to me."

        "Well, it belongs to me, I reckon, and confound your silly puritanical fancies, I'll leave it where I please," retorted Fletcher, and strode from the room.

        Throwing herself back into her chair, Maria lay for a time looking thoughtfully at the hickory log, which crumbled and threw out a shower of red sparks. Her face was grave, but there was no hint of indecision upon it, and it struck Carraway very forcibly at the instant that she knew her own mind quite clearly and distinctly upon this as upon most other matters.

        "It may surprise you," she said presently, speaking with sudden passion, "but by right the Hall ought not to be mine, and I do not want it. I have never loved it because it has never for a moment seemed home to me, and our people have always appeared strangers upon the land. How we came here I do not know, but it has not suited us, and we have only disfigured a beauty into which we did not fit. Its very age is a reproach to us, for it shows off our newness - our lack of any past that we may call our own. Will might feel himself master here, but I cannot."

        Carraway took off his glasses and rubbed patiently at the ridge they had drawn across his nose.

        "And yet, why not?" he asked. "The place has been in your grandfather's possession now for more than twenty years."

        "For more than twenty years," repeated Maria scornfully, "and before that the Blakes lived here - how long?"

        He met her question squarely. "For more than two hundred."

        Without shifting her steady gaze which she turned upon his face, she leaned forward, clasping her hands loosely upon the knees.

        "There are things that I want to know, Mr. Carraway," she said, "many things, and I believe that you can tell me. Most of all, I want to know why we ever came to Blake Hall? Why the Blakes ever left it? And, above all, why they have hated us so heartily and so long?"

        She paused and sat motionless, while she hung with suspended breath upon his reply.

        For a moment the lawyer hesitated, nervously twirling his glasses between his thumb and forefinger; then he slowly shook his head and looked from her to the fire.

        "Twenty years are not as a day, despite your scorn, my dear young lady, and many facts become overlaid with fiction in a shorter time."

        "But you know something - and you believe still more."

        "God forbid that I should convert you to any belief of mine."

        She put out a protesting hand, her eyes still gravely

insistent. "Tell me all - I demand it. It is my right; you must see that."

        "A right to demolish sand houses - to scatter old dust."

        "A right to hear the truth. Surely you will not withhold it from me?"

        "I don't know the truth, so I can't enlighten you. I know only the stories of both sides, and they resemble each other merely in that they both center about the same point of interest."

        "Then you will tell them to me - you must," she said earnestly. "Tell me first, word for word, all that the Blakes believe of us."

        With a laugh, he put on his glasses that he might bring her troubled face the more clearly before him.

        "A high spirit of impartiality, I admit," he observed.

        "That I should want to hear the other side?"

        "That, being a woman, you should take for granted the existence of the other side."

        She shook her head impatiently. "You can't evade me by airing camphor-scented views of my sex," she returned. "What I wish to know - and I still stick to my point, you see - is the very thing you are so carefully holding back."

        "I am holding back nothing, on my honour," he assured her. "If you want the impression which still exists in the county - only an impression - I must make plain to you at the start (for the events happened when the State was in the throes of reconstruction, when each man was busy rebuilding his own fortunes, and when tragedies occurred without notice and were hushed up without remark) - if you

want merely an impression, I repeat, then you may have it, my dear lady, straight from the shoulder."

        "Well?" her voice rose inquiringly, for he had paused.

        "There is really nothing definite known of the affair," he resumed after a moment, "even the papers which would have thrown light into the darkness were destroyed - burned, it is said, in an old office which the Federal soldiers fired. It is all mystery - grim mystery and surmise; and when there is no chance of either proving or disproving a case I dare say one man's word answers quite as well as another's. At all events, we have your grandfather's testimony as chief actor and eye-witness against the inherited convictions of our somewhat Homeric young neighbour. For eighteen years before the war, Mr. Fletcher was sole agent - a queer selection, certainly - for old Mr. Blake, who was known to have grown very careless in the confidence he placed. When the crash came, about three years after the war, the old gentleman's mind was much enfeebled, and it was generally rumoured that his children were kept in ignorance that the place was passing from them until it was auctioned off over their heads and Mr. Fletcher became the purchaser. How this was, of course, I do not pretend to say, but when the Hall finally went for the absurd sum of seven thousand dollars life was at best a hard struggle in the State, and I imagine there was less surprise at the sacrifice of the place than at the fact that your grandfather should have been able to put down the ready money. The making of a fortune is always, I suppose, more inexplicable than the losing of one.

The Blakes had always been accounted people of great wealth and wastefulness, but within five years from the close of the war they had sunk to the position in which you find them now - a change, I dare say, from which it is natural much lingering bitterness should result. The old man died almost penniless, and his children were left to struggle on from day to day as best they could. It is a sad tale, and I do not wonder that it moves you," he finished slowly, and looked down to wipe his glasses.

        "And grandfather?" asked the girl quietly. Her gaze had not wavered from his face, but her eyes shone luminous through the tears which filled them.

        "He became rich as suddenly as the Blakes became poor. Where his money came from no one asked, and no one cared except the Blakes, who were helpless. They made some small attempts at law suits, I believe, but Christopher was only a child then, and there was nobody with the spirit to push the case. Then money was needed, and they were quite impoverished."

        Maria threw out her hands with a gesture of revolt.

        "Oh, it is a terrible story," she said, "a terrible story."

        "It is an old one, and belongs to terrible times. You have drawn it from me for your own purpose, and be that as it may, I have always believed in giving a straight answer to a straight question. Now such things would be impossible," he added cheerfully; "then, I fear, they were but too probable."

        "In your heart you believe that it is true?"

        He did not flinch from his response. "In my heart I believe that there is more in it than a lie."

        Rising from her chair, she turned from him and walked rapidly up and down the room, through the firelight which shimmered over the polished floor. Once she stopped by the window, and, drawing the curtains aside, looked out upon the April sunshine and upon the young green leaves which tinted the distant woods. Then coming back to the hearthrug, she stood gazing down upon him with a serene and resolute expression.

        "I am glad now that the Hall will be mine," she said, "glad even that it wasn't left to Will, for who knows how he would have looked at it. There is but one thing to be done: you must see that yourself. At grandfather's death the place must go back to its rightful owners."

        "To its rightful owners?" he repeated in amazement, and rose to his feet.

        "To the Blakes. Oh, don't you see it - can't you see that there is nothing else to do in common honesty?"

        He shook his head, smiling.

        "It is very beautiful, my child, but is it reasonable, after all?" he asked.

        "Reasonable?" The fine scorn he had heard before in her voice thrilled her from head to foot. "Shall I stop to ask what is reasonable before doing what is right?"

        Without looking at her, he drew a handkerchief from his pocket and shook it slowly out from its folds.

        "Well, I'm not sure that you shouldn't," he rejoined.

        "Then I shan't be reasonable. I'll be wise," she said; "for surely, if there is any wisdom upon earth, it is simply to do right. It may be many years off, and I may be an old woman, but when the Hall comes to me at grandfather's death I shall return it to the Blakes."

        In the silence which followed he found himself looking into her ardent face with a wonder not unmixed with awe. To his rather cynical view of the Fletchers such an outburst came as little less than a veritable thunderclap, and for the first time in his life he felt a need to modify his conservative theories as to the necessity of blue blood to nourish high ideals. Maria, indeed, seemed to him as she stood there, drawn fine and strong against the curtains of faded green, to hold about her something better than that aroma of the past which he had felt to be the intimate charm of all exquisite things, and it was at the moment the very light and promise of the future which he saw in the broad intelligence of her brow. Was it possible, after all, he questioned, that out of the tragic wreck of old claims and old customs which he had witnessed there should spring creatures of even finer fiber than those who had gone before?

        "So this is your last word?" he inquired helplessly.

        "My last word to you - yes. In a moment I am going out to see the Blakes - to make them understand."

        He put out his hand as if to detain her by a feeble pull at her skirt.

        "At least, you will sleep a night upon your resolution?"

        "How can my sleeping alter things? My waking may."

        "And you will sweep the claims of twenty years aside in an hour?"

        "They are swept aside by the claims of two hundred."

        With a courteous gesture he bent over her hand and raised it gravely to his lips.

        "My dear young friend, you are very lovely and very unreasonable," he said.

CHAPTER VIII
BETWEEN MARIA AND CHRISTOPHER

stood out vividly in the mental image which remained with her when she lowered her eyes.

        Aroused by a sound from the house, he looked up and saw her standing on the edge of the ploughed field, her lace scarf blown softly in the April wind. After a single minute of breathless surprise he tossed the long ropes on the ground, and, leaving the plough, came rapidly across the loose clods of upturned earth.

        "Did you come because I was thinking of you?" he asked simply, with the natural directness which had appealed so strongly to her fearless nature.

        "Were you thinking of me?" her faint smile shone on him for an instant; "and were your thoughts as grave, I wonder, as my reason for coming?"

        "So you have a reason, then?"

        "Did you think I should dare to come without one?"

        The light wind caught her scarf, blowing the long ends about her head. From the frame of soft white lace her eyes looked dark and solemn and very distant.

        "I had hoped that you had no other reason than - kindness." He had lost entirely the rustic restraint he had once felt in her presence, and, as he stood there in his clothes of dull blue jean, it was easy to believe in the gallant generations at his back. Was the fret of their gay adventures in his blood? she wondered.

        "You will see the kindness in my reason, I hope," she answered quietly, while the glow of her sudden resolution illumined her face, "and at least you will admit the justice - though belated."

        He drew a step nearer. "And it concerns you - and me?" he asked.

        "It concerns you - oh, yes, yes, and me also, though very slightly. I have just learned - just a moment ago - what you must have thought I knew all along."

        As he fell back she saw that he paled slowly beneath his sunburn.

        "You have just learned - what?" he demanded.

        "The truth," she replied; "as much of the truth as one may learn in an hour: how it came that you are here and I am there - at the Hall."

        "At the Hall?" he repeated, and there was relief in the quick breath he drew; "I had forgotten the Hall."

        "Forgotten it? Why, I thought it was your dream, your longing, your one great memory."

        Smiling into her eyes, he shook his head twice before he answered.

        "It was all that - once."

        "Then it is not so now?" she asked, disappointed, "and what I have to tell you will lose half its value."

        "So it is about the Hall?"

        With one hand she held back the fluttering lace upon her bosom, while lifting the other she pointed across the ploughed fields to the old gray chimneys huddled amid the budding oaks.

        "Does it not make you homesick to stand here and look at it?" she asked. "Think! For more than two hundred years your people lived there, and there is not a room within the house, nor a spot upon the land, that does not hold some sacred association for those of your name."

        Startled by the passion in her words, he turned from the Hall at which he had been gazing.

        "What do you mean?" he demanded imperatively. "What do you wish to say?"

        "Look at the Hall and not at me while I tell you. It is this - now listen and do not turn from it for an instant. Blake Hall - I have just found it out - will come to me at grandfather's death, and when it does - when it does I shall return it to your family - the whole of it, every lovely acre. Oh, don't look at me - look at the Hall!"

        But he looked neither at her nor at the Hall, for his gaze dropped to the ground and hung blankly upon a clod of dry brown earth. She saw him grow pale to the lips and dark blue circles come out slowly about his eyes.

        "It is but common justice; you see that," she urged.

        At this he raised his head and returned her look.

        "And what of Will?" he asked.

        Her surprise showed in her face, and at sight of it he repeated his question with a stubborn insistence: "But what of Will? What has been done for Will?"

        "Oh, I don't know; I don't know. The break is past mending. But it is not of him that I must speak to you now - it is of yourself. Don't you see that the terrible injustice has bowed me to the earth? What am I better than a dependent - a charity ward who has lived for years upon your money? My very education, my little culture, the refinements you see in me - these even I have no real right to, for they belong to your family. While you have worked as a labourer in the field I have been busy squandering the wealth which was not mine."

        His face grew gentle as he looked at her.

        "If the Blake money has made you what you are, then it has not been utterly wasted," he replied.

        "Oh, you don't understand - you don't understand," she repeated, pressing her hands upon her bosom, as if to quiet her fluttering breath. "You have suffered from it all along, but it is I who suffer most to-day - who suffer most because I am upon the side of the injustice. I can have no peace until you tell me that I may still do my poor best to make amends - that when your home is mine you will let me give it back to you."

        "It is too late," he answered with bitter humour. "You can't put a field-hand in a fine house and make him a gentleman. It is too late to undo what was done twenty years ago. The place can never be mine again - I have even ceased to want it. Give it to Will."

        "I couldn't if I wanted to," she replied "but I don't want to - I don't want to. It must go back to you and to your sisters. Do you think I could ever be owner of it now? Even if it comes to me when I am an old woman, I shall always feel myself a stranger in the house, though I should live there day and night for fifty years. No, no; it is impossible that I should ever keep it for an instant. It must go back to you and to the Blakes who come after you."

        "There will be no Blakes after me," he answered. "I am the last."

        "Then promise me that if the Hall is ever mine you will take it."

        "From you? No; not unless I took it to hand on to your brother. It is an old score that you have

brought up - one that lasted twenty years before it was settled. It is too late to stir up matters now."

        "It is not too late," she said earnestly. "It is never too late to try to undo a wrong."

        "The wrong was not yours: it must never touch you," he replied. "If my life was as clean as yours, it would, perhaps, not be too late for me either. Ten years ago I might have felt differently about it, but not now."

        He broke off hurriedly, and Maria, with a hopeless gesture, turned back into the path.

        "Then I shall appeal to your sisters when the time comes," she responded quietly.

        Catching the loose ends of her scarf, he drew her slowly around until she met his eyes. "And I have said nothing to you - to you," he began, in a constrained voice, which he tried in vain to steady, "because it is so hard to say anything and not say too much. This, at least, you must know - that I am your servant now and shall be all my life."

        She smiled sadly, looking down at the scarf which was crushed in his hands.

        "And yet you will not grant the wish of my heart," she said.

        "How could I? Put me back in the Hall, and I should be as ignorant and as coarse as I am out here. A labourer is all I am and all I am fit to be. I once had a rather bookish ambition, you know, but that is over - I wanted to read Greek and translate 'The Iliad' and all that - and yet to-day I doubt if I could write a decent letter to save my soul. It's partly my fault, of course, but you can't know - you could never know - the abject bitterness and

despair of those years when I tried to sink myself to the level of the brutes - tried to forget that I was any better than the oxen I drove. No, there's no pulling me up again; such things aren't lived over, and I'm down for good."

        Her tears, which she had held back, broke forth at his words, and he saw them fall upon her bosom, where her hands were still tightly clasped.

        "And it is all our fault," she said brokenly.

        "Not yours, surely."

        "It is not too late," she went on passionately, laying her hand upon his arm and looking up at him with a misty brightness. "Oh, if you would let me make amends - let me help you!"

        "Is there any help?" he asked, with his eyes on the hand upon his arm.

        "If you will let me, I will find it. We will take up your study where you broke it off - we will come up step by step, even to Homer, if you like. I am fond of books, you know, and I have had my fancy for Greek, too. Oh, it will be so easy - so easy; and when the time comes for you to go back to the Hall, I shall have made you the most learned Blake of the whole line."

        He bent quickly and kissed the hand which trembled on his sleeve.

        "Make of me what you please," he said; "I am at your service."

        For the second time he saw the wonderful light - the fervour - illumine her face, and then fade slowly, leaving a still, soft radiance of expression.

        "Then I may teach you all that you haven't learned," she said with a happy little laugh. "How

fortunate that I should have been born a bookworm. Shall we begin with Greek?"

        He smiled. "No; let's start with English - and start low."

        "Then we'll do both; but where shall it be? Not at the Hall."

        "Hardly. There's a bench, though, down by the poplar spring that looks as if it were meant to be in school. Do you know the plan? It's in my pasture by the meadow brook?"

        "I can find it, and I'll bring the books to-morrow at this hour. Will you come?"

        "To-morrow - and every day?"

        "Every day."

        For an instant he looked at her in perplexity. "I may as well tell you," he said at last, "that I'm one of the very biggest rascals on God's earth. I'm not worth all this, you know; that's honest."

        "And so are you," she called back gaily, as she turned from him and went rapidly along the little path.

CHAPTER IX
CHRISTOPHER FACES HIMSELF

        A little later, Tucker, who was sitting on the end of a big log at the woodpile, looked up in surprise from the ant-hill he was watching.

        "Quit work early, eh, Christopher?"

        "Yes; I've given out," replied Christopher, stopping beside him and picking up the axe which lay in a scattered pile of chips. "It's the spring weather, I

reckon, but I'm not fit for a tougher job than chopping wood."

        "Well, I'd leave that off just now, if I were you."

        Raising the axe, Christopher swung it lightly over his shoulder; then, lowering it with a nerveless movement, he tossed it impatiently on the ground.

        "A queer thing happened just now, Uncle Tucker," he said, "a thing you'll hardly believe even when I tell you. I had a visit from Mrs. Wyndham, and she came to say - " he stammered and broke off abruptly.

        "Mrs. Wyndham?" repeated Tucker. "She's Bill Fletcher's granddaughter, isn't she?"

        "Maria Fletcher - you may have seen her when she lived here, five or six years ago."

        Tucker shook his head.

        "Bless your heart, my boy, I haven't seen a woman except Lucy and the girls for twenty-five years. But why did she come, I wonder?"

        "That's the strange part, and you won't understand it until you see her. She came because she had just heard - some one had told her - about Fletcher's old rascality."

        "You don't say so!" exclaimed Tucker beneath his breath. He gave a long whistle and sat smiling at the little red ant-hill. "And did she actually proffer an apology?" he inquired.

        "An amendment, rather. The Hall will come to her at Fletcher's death, and she walked over to say quite coolly that she wanted to give it back to us. Think of that! To part with such a home for the sake of mere right and justice."

        "It is something to think about," assented Tucker,

"and to think hard about, too - and yet I cut my teeth on the theory that women have no sense of honour. Now, that is pure, foolish, strait-laced honour, and nothing else."

        "Nothing else," repeated Christopher softly; "and if you'll believe it, she cried - she really cried when I told her I couldn't take it. Oh, she's wonderful!" he burst out suddenly, all his awkward reserve dropping from him. "You can't be with her ten minutes without feeling how good she is - good all through, with a big goodness that isn't in the least like the little prudishness of other women - "

        He checked himself hastily, but not before Tucker had glanced up with his pleasant smile.

        "Well, my boy, I don't misunderstand you. I never knew a man yet to begin a love affair with a panegyric on virtue. She's an estimable woman, I dare say, and I presume she's plain."

        "Plain!" gasped Christopher. "Why, she's beautiful - at least, you think so when you see her smile."

        "So she smiled through her tears, ah?"

        Christopher started angrily. "Can you sit there on that log and laugh at such a thing?" he demanded.

        "Come, come," protested Tucker, "an honest laugh never turned a sweet deed sour since the world began - and that was more than sweet; it was fine. I'd like to know that woman, Christopher."

        "You could never know her - no man could. She's all clear and bright on the surface, but all mystery beneath."

        "Ah, that's it; you see, there was never a fascinating woman yet who was easy to understand. Wasn't it that shrewd old gallant, Bolivar Blake, who said

that in love an ounce of mystery was worth a pound of morality?"

        "It's like him: he said a lot of nonsense," commented Christopher. "But to think," he added after a moment, "that she should be Bill Fletcher's granddaughter!"

        "Well, I knew her mother," returned Tucker, "and she was as honest, God-fearing a body as ever trod this earth. She stood out against Fletcher to the last, you know, and worked hard for her living while that scamp, her husband, drank them both to death. There are some people who are born with a downright genius for honesty, and this girl may be one of them."

        "I don't know - I don't know," said Christopher, in a voice which had grown spiritless. Then after an instant in which he stared blankly down at Tucker's ant-hill, he turned hurriedly away and followed the little straggling path to the barn door.

        From the restlessness that pricked in his limbs there was no escape, and after entering the barn he came out again and went down into the pasture to the long bench beside the poplar spring. Here, while the faint shadows of the young leaves played over him, he sat with his head bent forward and his hands dropped listlessly between his knees.

        Around him there was the tender green of the spring meadows, divided by a little brook where the willows shone pure silver under the April wind. Near at hand a catbird sang in short, tripping notes, and in the clump of briars by the spring a rabbit sat alert for the first sound. So motionless was Christopher that he seemed, sitting there by the pale

gray body of a poplar, almost to become a part of the tree against which he leaned - to lose, for the time at least, his share in the moving animal life around him.

        At first there was mere blankness in his mind - an absence of light and colour in which his thoughts were suddenly blotted out; then, as the wind raised the hair upon his brow, he lifted his eyes from the ground, and with the movement it seemed as if his life ran backward to its beginning and he saw himself not as he was to-day, but as he might have been in a period of time which had no being.

        Before him were his knotted and blistered hands, his long limbs outstretched in their coarse clothes, but in the vision beyond the little spring he walked proudly with his rightful heritage upon him - a Blake by force of blood and circumstance. The world lay before him - bright, alluring, a thing of enchanting promise, and it was as if he looked for the first time upon the possibilities contained in this life upon the earth. For an instant the glow lasted - the beauty dwelt upon the vision, and he beheld, clear and radiant, the happiness which might have been his own; then it grew dark again, and he faced the brutal truth in all its nakedness: he knew himself for what he was - a man debased by ignorance and passion to the level of the beasts. He had sold his birthright for a requital, which had sickened him even in the moment of fulfilment.

        To do him justice, now that the time had come for an acknowledgment he felt no temptation to evade the judgment of his own mind, nor to cheat himself with the belief that the boy was marked for ruin

before he saw him - that Will had worked out, in vicious weakness, his own end. It was not the weakness, after all, that he had played upon - it was rather the excitable passion and the whimpering fears of the hereditary drunkard. He remembered now the long days that he had given to his revenge, the nights when he had tossed sleepless while he planned a widening of the breach with Fletcher. That, at, least was his work, and his alone - the bitter hatred, more cruel than death, with which the two now stood apart and snarled. It was a human life that he had taken in his hand - he saw that now in his first moment of awakening - a life that he had destroyed as deliberately as if he had struck it dead before him. Day by day, step by step, silent, unswerving, devilish, he had kept about his purpose, and now at the last he had only to sit still and watch his triumph.

        With a sob, he bowed his head in his clasped hands, and so shut out the light.

CHAPTER X
BY THE POPLAR SPRING

        "So you are present at the roll-call?" she said, laughing, as she sat down on the bench beside him and spread out the books that she had brought.

        "Why, I've been sitting here for half an hour," he answered.

        "What a shame - that's a whole furrow unploughed, isn't it?"

        "Several of them; but I'm not counting furrows now. I'm getting ready to appal you by my ignorance." He spoke with a determined, reckless gaiety that lent a peculiar animation to his face.

        "If you are waiting for that, you are going to be

disappointed," she replied, smiling, "for I've put my heart into the work, and I was born and patterned for a teacher; I always knew it. We're going to do English literature and a first book in Latin."

        "Are we?" He picked up the Latin grammar and ran his fingers lightly through the pages. "I went a little way in this once," he said. "I got as far as omnia vincit amor and stopped. Tobacco conquered me instead."

        She caught up his gay laugh. "Well, we'll try it over again," she returned, and held out the book.

        An hour later, when the first lesson was over and he had gone back to his work, he carried with him a wonderful exhilaration - a feeling as if he had with a sudden effort burst the bonds that had held him to the earth. By the next day the elation vanished and a great heaviness came in its place, but for a single afternoon he had known what it was to thrill in every fiber with a powerful and pure emotion - an emotion beside which all the cheap sensations of his life showed stale and colourless. While the strangeness of this mood was still upon him he chanced upon Lila and Jim Weatherby standing together by the gate in the gray dusk, and when presently the girl came back alone across the yard he laid his hand upon her arm and drew her over to Tucker's bench beside the rose-bush.

        "Lila, I've changed my mind about it all," he said.

        "About what, dear?"

        "About Jim and you. We were all wrong - all of us except Uncle Tucker - wrong from the very start. You musn't mind mother; you musn't mind

anybody. Marry Jim and be happy, if he can make you so."

        "Oh, Christopher!" gasped Lila, with a long breath, lifting her lovely, pensive face. "Oh, Christopher!"

        "Don't wait; don't put it off; don't listen to any of us," he urged impatiently. "Good God! If you love him as you say you do, why have you let all these years slip away?"

        "But you thought it was best, Christopher. You told me so."

        "Best! There's nothing best except to be happy if you get the chance."

        "He wants me to marry him now," said Lila, lowering her voice. "Mother will never know, he thinks, her mind grows so feeble; he wants me to marry him without any getting ready - after church one Sunday morning."

        Putting his arm about her, Christopher held her for a moment against his side. "Then do it," he said gravely, as he stooped and kissed her.

        And several weeks later, on a bright first Sunday in May, Lila was married, after morning services, in the little country church, and Christopher watched her almost eagerly as she walked home across the broad meadows powdered white with daisies. To the reproachful countenance which Cynthia presented to him upon his return to the house he gave back a careless and defiant smile.

        "So it's all over," he announced gaily, "and Lila's married at last."

        "Then you're satisfied, I hope," rejoined Cynthia grimly, "now that you've dragged us down to the level of the Weatherbys and - the Fletchers? There's

nothing more to be said about it, I suppose, and you may as well come in to dinner."

        She held herself stiffly aloof from the subject, with her head flung back and her chin expressing an indignant protest. There was a kind of rebellious scorn in the way in which she carved the shoulder of bacon and poured the coffee.

        "Good Lord! It's such a little thing to make a fuss about," said Tucker, "when you remember, my dear, that our levels aren't any bigger than chalk lines in the eyes of God Almighty."

        Cynthia regarded him with squinting displeasure.

        "Oh, of course; you have no family pride," she returned; "but I had thought there was a little left in Christopher."

        Christopher shook his head, smiling indifferently. "Not enough to want blood sacrifices," he responded, and fell into a detached and thoughtful silence. The vision of Lila in her radiant happiness remained with him like a picture that one has beheld by some rare chance in a vivid and lovely light; and it was still before him when he left the house presently and strolled slowly down to meet Maria by the poplar spring.

        The bloom of the meadows filled his nostrils with a delicate fragrance, and from the bough of an old apple-tree in the orchard he heard the low afternoon murmurs of a solitary thrush. May was on the earth, and it had entered into him as into the piping birds and the spreading trees. It was at last good to be alive - to breathe the warm, sweet air, and to watch the sunshine slanting on the low, green hill. So closely akin were his moods to those of the

changing seasons that, at the instant, he seemed to feel the current of his being flow from the earth beneath his feet - as if his physical nature drew strength and nourishment from that genial and abundant source.

        When he reached the spring he saw Maria appear on the brow of the hill, and with a quick, joyous bound his heart leaped up to meet her. As she came toward him her white dress swept the tall grass from her feet, and her shadow flew like a winged creature straight before her. There was a vivid softness in her face - a look at once bright and wistful - which moved him with a new and strange tenderness.

        "I was a little late," she explained, as they met before the long bench and she laid her books upon it," and I am very warm. May I have a drink?"

        "From a bramble cup?"

        "How else?" She took off her hat and tossed it on the grass at her feet; then, going to the spring, she waited while he plucked a leaf from the bramble and bent it into shape. When he filled it and held it out, she placed her lips to the edge of the leaf and looked up at him with smiling eyes while she drank slowly from his hand.

        "It holds only a drop, but how delicious!" she said, seating herself again upon the bench and leaning back against the great body of a poplar. Then her eyes fell upon his clothes. "Why, how very much dressed you look!" she added.

        "Oh, there's a reason besides Sunday - I've just come from a wedding. Lila has married after twelve years of waiting."

        "Your pretty sister! And to whom?"

        "To Jim Weatherby - old Jacob's son, you know. Now, don't tell me that you disapprove. I count on your good sense to see the wisdom of it."

        "So it is your pretty sister," she said slowly, "the woman I passed in the road the other day and held my breath as I did before Botticelli's Venus."

        "Is that so? Well, she doesn't know much about pictures, nor does Jim. She has thrown herself away, Cynthia says, but what could she have waited for, after all? Nothing had ever come to her, and she had lived thirty years. Besides, she will be very happy, and that's a good deal, isn't it?"

        "It's everything," said Maria quietly, looking down into her lap.

        "Everything? And if you had been born in her place?"

        "I am not in her place and never could be; but six years ago, if I had been told that I must live here all my life, I think I should have fretted myself to death: that would have happened six years ago, for I was born with a great aching for life, and I thought then that one could live only in the big outside world - "

        "And now?" he questioned, for she paused and sat smiling gravely at the book she held.

        "Now I know that the fulness of life does not come from the things outside of us, and that we ourselves must create the beauty in which we live. Oh, I have learned so much from misery," she went on softly, "and worst of all, I have learned what it is to starve for bread in the midst of sugar-plums."

        "And it was worth learning?"

        "The knowledge that I gained? Oh, yes, yes; for it taught me how to be happy. I went down into hell," she said passionately, "and I came out - clean. I saw evil such as I had never heard of; I went close to it, I even touched it, but I always kept my soul very far away, and I was like a person in a dream. The more I saw of sin and ugliness the more I dreamed of peace and beauty. I builded me my own refuge, I fed on my own strength day and night - and I am what I am - "

        "The loveliest woman on God's earth," he said.

        "You do not know me," she answered, and opened the book before her. "It was the story of the Holy Grail," she added, "and we left off here. Oh, those brave days of King Arthur! It was always May then."

        He touched the page lightly with a long blade of grass.

        "Read yourself - this once," he pleaded, "and let me listen."

        Leaning a little forward, she looked down and slowly turned the pages, her head bent over the book, her long lashes shading the faint flush in her cheeks. Over her white dress fell a delicate lacework from the young poplar leaves, flecked here and there with pale drops of sunshine, which filtered through the thickly clustered boughs. When the wind passed in the high tree-tops, the shadows, soft and fine as cobweb, rippled over her dress, and a loose strand of her dark hair waved gently about her ear. The life - the throbbing vitality within her seemed to vivify the very air she breathed, and he felt all at once that the glad thrill which stirred his blood was

but a response to the fervent spirit which spoke in her voice.

        "For it giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month of May," she read, "in something to constrain him to some manner of thing more in that month than in any other month - for then all herbs and trees renew a man and woman, and in likewise lovers call again to mind old gentleness and old service and many kind deeds that were forgotten by negligence."

        The words went like wine to his head, and he saw her shadowy figure recede and dissolve suddenly as in a mist. A lump rose in his throat, his heart leaped, and he felt his pulses beating madly in his temples. He drew back, closing his eyes to shut out her face; but the next instant, as she stirred slightly to hold down the rippling leaves, he bent forward and laid his hand upon the one that held the open book.

        Her voice fluttered into silence, and, raising her head, she looked up in tremulous surprise. He saw her face pale slowly, her lids quiver and droop above her shining eyes, and her teeth gleam milk white between her parted lips. A tremor of alarm ran through her, and she made a swift movement to escape; then, lifting her eyes again, she looked full into his own, and, stooping quickly, he kissed her on the mouth.

        An instant afterward the book fell to the ground, and he rose to his feet and stood trembling against the body of the poplar.

        "Forgive me," he said; "forgive me - I have ruined it."

        Standing beside the bench, she watched him with a still, grave gentleness before which his gaze dropped slowly to the ground.

        "Yes, you have ruined this," she answered, smiling, "but Latin is still left."

        "It's no use," he went on breathlessly. "I can't do it; it's no use."

        His eyes sought hers and held them while he made a single step forward; then, turning quickly away, he went from her across the meadow to the distant wood.

BOOK FIFTH
THE ANCIENT LAW

THE ANCIENT LAW

CHAPTER I
CHRISTOPHER SEEKS AN ESCAPE

wrong no longer stood out in a blaze of light. A woman's smile divided him like a drawn sword from his brutal past, and he had lost the reckless courage with which he once might have flung himself upon destruction.

        Rising presently, he crossed the meadow and went slowly back to his work in the stables, keeping his thoughts with an effort upon his accustomed tasks. A great weariness for the endless daily round of small things was upon him, and he felt all at once that the emotion struggling within his heart must burst forth at last and pervade the visible world. He was conscious of an impulse to sing, to laugh, to talk in broken sentences to himself; and any utterance, however slight and meaningless, seemed to relieve in a measure the nervous tension of his thoughts.

        In one instant there entered into him a desperate determination to play the traitor - to desert his post and strike out boldly and alone into the world. And with the next breath he saw himself living to old age as he had lived from boyhood - within reach of Maria's hand, meeting her fervent eyes, and yet separated from her by a distance greater than God or man could bridge. With the thought of her he saw again her faint smile which lingered always about her mouth, and his blood stirred at the memory of the kiss which she had neither resisted nor returned.

        Cynthia, searching for him a few minutes later, found him leaning idly against the mare's stall, looking down upon a half-finished nest which a house-wren had begun to build upon his currycomb.

        "It's a pity to disturb that, Tucker would say,"

he observed, motioning toward the few wisps of. straw on the ledge.

        "Oh, she can start it somewhere else," replied Cynthia indifferently. "They have sent for you from the store, Christopher - it's something about one of the servants, I believe. They're always getting into trouble and wanting you to pull them out." The descendants of the old Blake slaves were still spoken of by Cynthia as "the servants," though they had been free men and women for almost thirty years.

        Christopher started from his abstraction and turned toward her with a gesture of annoyance.

        "Well, I'll have to go down, I suppose," he said. "Has mother asked for me to-day?"

        "Only for Jim again - it's always Jim now. I declare, I believe we might all move away and she'd never know the difference so long as he was left. She forgets us entirely sometimes, and fancies that father is alive again."

        "It's a good thing Jim amuses her, at any rate."

        An expression of anger drew Cynthia's brows together. "Oh, I dare say; but it does seem hard that she should have grown to dislike me after all I've done for her. There are times when she won't let me even come in the room - when she's not herself, you know."

        Her words were swallowed in a sob, and he stood staring at her in an amazement too sudden to be mixed with pity.

        "And you have given up your whole life to her," he exclaimed! appalled by the injustice of the god of sacrifice.

        Cynthia put up one knotted hand and stroked back the thin hair upon her temples. "It was all I had to give," she answered, and went out into the yard.

        He let her go from him without replying, and before her pathetic figure had reached the house she was blotted entirely from his thoughts, for it was a part of the tragedy of her unselfishness that she had never existed as a distinct personality even in the minds of those who knew and loved her.

        When presently he passed through the yard on his way to the store, he saw her taking in the dried clothes from the old lilac-bushes and called back carelessly that he would be home to supper. Then forgetting her lesser miseries in his own greater one, he fell into his troubled brooding as he swung rapidly along the road.

        At the store the usual group of loungers welcomed him, and among them he saw to his surprise the cheerful face of Jim Weatherby, a little clouded by the important news he was evidently seeking to hold back.

        "I tried to keep them from sending for you Christopher," the young man explained. "It is no business of yours - that is what I said."

        "Well, it seems that every thriftless nigger in the county thinks he's got a claim upon you, sho' enough," put in Tom Spade. "It warn't mo'n last week that I had a letter from the grandson of yo' pa's old blacksmith Buck, sayin' he was to hang in Philadelphia for somebody's murder, an' that I must tell Marse Christopher to come an' git him off. Thar's a good six hunnard of 'em, black an' yaller

an' it's God A'mighty or Marse Christopher to 'em every one."

        "What is it now?" asked Christopher a little wearily, taking off his hat and running his hand through his thick, fair hair. "If anybody's been stealing chickens they've got to take the consequences."

        "Oh, it's not chicken stealin' this time; it's a blamed sight worse. They want you to send somebody over to Uncle Isam's - you remember his little cabin, five miles off in Morse's woods - to help him bury his children who have died of smallpox. There are four of 'em dead, it seems, an' the rest are all down with the disease. Thar's not a morsel of food in the house, an' not a livin' nigger will go nigh 'em."

        "Uncle Isam!" repeated Christopher, as if trying to recall the name. "Why, I haven't laid eyes upon the man for years."

        "Very likely; but he's sent you a message by a boy who was gathering pine knots at the foot of his hill. He was to tell Marse Christopher that he had had nothing to eat for two whole days an' his children were unburied. Then the boy got scared an' scampered off, an' that was all."

        Christopher's laugh sounded rather brutal.

        "So he used to belong to us, did he?" he inquired.

        "He was yo' pa's own coachman. I recollect him plain as day," answered Tom. "I warn't mo'n a child then, an' he used to flick his whip at my bare legs whenever he passed me in the road."

        "Well, what is to be done?" asked Christopher, turning suddenly upon him.

        "The Lord He knows, suh. Thar's not a nigger as will go nigh him, an' I'm not blamin' 'em; not I. Jim's filled his cart with food, an' he's goin' to dump the things out at the foot of the hill; then maybe Uncle Isam can crawl down an' drag 'em back. His wife's down with it, too, they say. She was workin' here not mo'n six months ago, but she left her place of a sudden an' went back again."

        Christopher glanced carelessly at the little cart waiting in the road, and then throwing off his coat tossed it on the seat.

        "I'll trouble you to lend me your overalls, Tom," he said, "and you can send a boy up to the house and get mine in exchange. Put what medicines you have in the cart; I'll take them over to the old fool."

        "Good Lord!" said Tom, and mechanically got out of his blue Jean clothes.

        "Now don't be a downright ass, Christopher," put in Jim Weatherby. "You've got your mother on your hands, you know, and what under heaven have you to do with Uncle Isam? I knew some foolishness would most likely come of it if they sent up for you."

        "Oh, he used to belong to us, you see," explained Christopher carelessly.

        "And he's been an ungrateful, thriftless free Negro for nearly thirty years - "

        "That's just it - for not quite thirty years. Look here, if you'll drive me over in the cart and leave the things at the foot of the hill I'll be obliged to you. I'll probably have to stay out a couple of weeks - until there's no danger of my bringing back the disease - so I'll wear Tom's overalls and leave

my clothes somewhere in the woods. Oh, I'll take care, of course; I'm no fool."

        "You're surer of that than I am," returned Jim, thinking of Lila. "I can't help feeling that there's some truth in father's saying that a man can't be a hero without being a bit of a fool as well. For God's sake, don't, Christopher. You have no right - "

        "No, I have no right," repeated Christopher, as he got into the cart and took up the hanging reins. A sudden animation had leaped into his face and his eyes were shining. It was the old love of a "risk for the sake of the risk" which to Tucker had always seemed to lack the moral elements of true courage, and the careless gaiety with which he spoke robbed the situation of its underlying somber horror.

        Jim swung himself angrily upon the seat and touched the horse lightly with the whip. "And there's your mother sitting at home - and Cynthia - and Lila," he said.

        Christopher turned on him a face in whose expression he found a mystery that he could not solve.

        "I can't help it, Jim, to save my life I can't," he answered. "It isn't anything heroic; you know that as well as I. I don't care a straw for Uncle Isam and his children, but if I didn't go up there and bury those dead darkies I'd never have a moment's peace. I've been everything but a skulking coward, and I can't turn out to be that at the end. It's the way I'm made."

        "Well, I dare say we're made different," responded Jim rather dryly, for it was his wedding day and he was going farther from his bride. "But for my part,

I can't help thinking of that poor blind old lady, and how helpless they all are. Yes, we're made different. I reckon that's what it means."

        The cart jogged on slowly through the fading sunshine, and when at last it came to the foot of the hill where Uncle Isam lived Christopher got out and shouldered a bag of meal.

        "You'll run the place, I know, and look after mother while I'm away," he said.

        "Oh, I suppose I'll have to," returned Jim; and then his ill-humour vanished and he smiled and held out his hand. "Good-by, old man. God bless you," he said heartily.

        Sitting there in the road, he watched Christopher pass out of sight under the green leaves, stooping slightly beneath the bag of meal and whistling a merry scrap of an old song. At the instant it came to Jim with the force of a blow that this was the first cheerful sound he had heard from him for weeks; and, still pondering, he turned the horse's head and drove slowly home to his own happiness.

CHAPTER II
THE MEASURE OF MARIA

        "Oh, dear, you might have died!" breathed the girl with a shudder.

        Christopher laughed.

        "So might Uncle Tucker when he went into the war," was his retort. He was a little thinner, a little graver, and the sunburn upon his face had faded to a paler shade. After the short absence his powerful figure struck them as almost gigantic; physically, he had never appeared more impressive than he did standing there in the sunlight that filled the kitchen doorway.

        "But that was different," protested Lila, flushing "and this - this - why, you hardly knew Uncle Isam when you passed him in the road."

        "And half the time forgot to speak to him," added Tucker, laughing. His eyes were on the young man's figure, and they grew a little wistful, as they always did in the presence of perfect masculine strength. "Well, I'm glad your search for adventures didn't end in disaster," he added pleasantly.

        To Christopher's surprise, Cynthia was the single

member of the family who showed a sympathy with his reckless knight errantry. "There was nothing else for you to do, of course," she said in a resolute voice, lifting her worn face where the lines had deepened in his absence; "he used to be father's coachman before the war."

        She had gone from the kitchen as she spoke, and Christopher, following her, threw an anxious glance along the little platform to the closed door of the house.

        "And mother, Cynthia?" he asked quickly.

        "Her mind still wanders, but at times she seems to come back to herself for a little while, and only this morning she awoke from a nap and asked for you quite clearly. We told her you had gone hunting."

        "May I see her now? Who is with her?"

        "Jim. He has been so good."

        The admission was wrung shortly from her rigid honesty, and there was no visible softening of her grim reserve, when, entering the house with Christopher, she found herself presently beside Jim Weatherby, who was chatting merrily in Mrs. Blake's room.

        The old lady, shrivelled and faded as the dried goldenrod which filled the great jars on the hearth, lay half hidden among the pillows in her high white bed, her vacant eyes fixed upon the sunshine which fell through the little window. At Christopher's step her memory flickered back for an instant, and the change showed in the sudden animation of her glance.

        "I was dreaming of your father, my son, and you have his voice."

        "I am like him in other ways, I hope, mother."

        "If I could only see you, Christopher - it is so hard to remember. You had golden curls and wore a white pinafore. I trimmed it with the embroidery from my last set of petticoats. And your hands were dimpled all over; you would suck your thumb: there was no breaking you, though I wrapped it in a rag soaked in quinine - "

        "That was almost thirty years ago, mother," broke in Cynthia, catching her breath sharply." He is a man now, and big - oh, so big - and his hair has grown a little darker."

        "I know, Cynthia; I know," returned Mrs. Blake, with a peevish movement of her thin hand, "but you won't let me remember. I am trying to remember." She fell to whimpering like a hurt child and then growing suddenly quiet, reached out until she touched Christopher's head. "You're a man, I know," she said, "older than your father was when his first child was born. There have been two crosses in my life, Christopher - my blindness and my never having heard the voices of my grandchildren playing in the house. Such a roomy old house, too, with so much space for them to fill with cheerful noise. I always liked noise, you know, it tells of life, and never disturbs me so long as it is pleasant. What I hate is the empty silence that reminds one of the grave."

        She was quite herself now, and, bending over, he kissed the hand upon the counterpane.

        "Oh, mother, mother, if I could only have made you happy!"

        "And you couldn't, Christopher?"

        "I couldn't marry, dear; I couldn't."

        "There was no one, you mean - no woman whom you could have loved and who would have given you children. Surely there are still good and gentle women left in the world."

        "There was none for me."

        She sighed hopelessly.

        "You have never - never had a low fancy, Christopher?"

        "Never, mother."

        "Thank God; it is one thing I could not forgive. A gentleman may have his follies, your father used to say, but he must never stoop for them. Let him keep to his own level, even in his indiscretions. Ah, your father had his faults, my son, but he never forgot for one instant in his life that he was born a gentleman. He was a good husband, too, a good husband, and I was married to him for nearly forty years. The greatest trial of my marriage was that he would throw his cigar ashes on the floor. Women think so much of little things, you know, and I've always felt that I should have been a happier woman if he had learned to use an ash-tray. But he never would - he never would, though I gave him one every Christmas for almost forty years."

        Falling silent, her hands played fitfully upon the counterpane, and when next she spoke the present had slipped from her and her thoughts had gone back to her early triumphs.

        She wandered aimlessly and waveringly on in a feeble vacancy, and Christopher, after watching her for an agonised moment, left the room and went out into the fresh air of the yard. He could always escape by flight from the slow death-bed;

it was Cynthia who faced hourly the final tragedy of a long and happy life.

        The thought of Will had oppressed him like a nightmare for the last two weeks, and it was almost unconsciously that he turned now in the direction of the store and passed presently into the shaded lane leading to Sol Peterkin's. His mood was heavy upon him, and so deep was the abstraction in which he walked that it was only when he heard his name called softly from a little distance that he looked up to find Maria Fletcher approaching him over the pale gray shadows in the road. Her eyes were luminous, and she stretched her hand toward him in a happy gesture.

        "Oh, if you only knew how wonderful I think you!" she cried impulsively.

        He held her hand an instant, and then letting it fall, withdrew his gaze slowly from her exalted look. The pure heights of her fervour were beyond the reach of his more earthly level, and as he turned from her some old words of her own were respoken in his ears: "Faith and doubt are mere empty forms until we pour out the heart's blood that vivifies them." It was her heart's blood that she had put into her dreams, and it was this, he told himself, that gave her mystic visions their illusive appearance of reality. Beauty enveloped her as an atmosphere; it softened her sternest sacrifice, it coloured her barest outlook, it transformed daily the common road in which she walked, and hourly it sustained and nourished her, as it nourished poor, crippled Tucker on his old pine bench. The eye of the spirit was theirs - this Christopher had learned at last; and

he had learned, also, that for him there still remained only the weak, blurred vision of the flesh.

        "You make me feel the veriest hypocrite," he said at the end of the long pause.

        She shook her head. "And that you are surely not."

        "So you still believe in me?"

        "It's not belief - I know in you."

        "Well, don't praise me; don't admire me; don't pretend, for God's sake, that I'm anything better than the brute you see."

        "I don't pretend anything better," she protested; "and when you talk like this it only makes me feel the more keenly your wonderful courage."

        "I haven't any," he burst out almost angrily. "Not an atom, do you hear? Whatever I may appear on top, at bottom I am a great skulking coward, and nothing more. Why, I couldn't even stay and take my punishment the other day. I sneaked off like a hound."

        "Your punishment?" she faltered, and he saw her lashes tremble.

        "For the other day - for the afternoon by the poplar spring. I've been wanting to beg your pardon on my knees."

        Her lashes were raised steadily, and she regarded him gravely while a slight frown gathered her dark brows. She was still humanly feminine enough to find the apology harder to forgive than the offense.

        "Oh, I had forgotten," she said a little coldly. "So that was, after all, why you ran away?"

        "It was not the only reason."

        "And the other?"

        He closed his eyes suddenly and drew back.

        "I ran away because I knew if I stayed I should do it again within two seconds," he replied.

        A little blue flower was growing in the red clay wheel-rut at her feet, and, stooping, she caressed it gently without plucking it.

        "It was very foolish," she said in a quiet voice; "but I had forgotten it, and you should have let it rest. Afterward, you did such a brave, splendid thing."

        "I did nothing but run from you," he persisted, losing his head. "If I hadn't gone to Uncle Isam I'd have done something equally reckless in a different way. I wanted to get away from you - to escape you, but I couldn't - I couldn't. You were with me always, night and day, in those God-forsaken woods. I never lost you for one instant, never. I tried to, but I couldn't."

        "You couldn't," she repeated, and, rising, faced him calmly. Then before the look in his eyes her own wavered and fell slowly to the ground, and he saw her quiver and grow white as if a rough wind blew over her. With an effort he steadied himself and turned away.

        "There is but one thing to do," he said, holding his breath in the pause; "it's a long story, but if you will listen patiently - and it is very long - I will tell you all." Following him, she crossed the carpet of pine needles and sat down upon the end of a fallen log.

        "Tell me nothing that you do not care to," she answered, and sat waiting.

        "It began long ago, when we were both little

children," he went on, and then going back from her into the lane he stood staring down upon the little blue flower blooming in the wheel-rut. She saw his shadow, stretching across the road, blurred into the pale dusk of the wood, uncertain, somber, gigantic in its outline. His hat was lying on the ground at her feet, and, lifting it, she ran her fingers idly along the brim.

        For a time the silence lasted; then coming back to her, he sat down on the log and dropped his clasped hands between his knees. She heard his heavy breathing, and something in the sound drew her toward him with a sympathetic movement.

        "Ah, don't tell me, don't tell me," she entreated.

        "You must listen patiently," he returned, without looking at her, "and not interrupt - above all, not interrupt."

        She bent her head. "I will not speak a word nor move a finger until the end," she promised; and leaning a little forward, with his eyes on the ground and his hands hanging listlessly between his knees, he began his story.

        The air was so still that his voice sounded strangely harsh in the silence, but presently she heard the soughing of the pine trees far up above, and while it lasted it deadened the jarring discord of the human tones. She sat quite motionless upon the log, not lifting a finger nor speaking a word, as she had promised, and her gaze was fixed steadily upon a bit of dried fern growing between the roots of a dead tree.

        "It went on so for five years," he slowly finished, "and it as from beginning to end deliberate,

devilish revenge. I meant from the first to make him what he is to-day. I meant to make him hate his grandfather as he does - I meant to make him the hopeless drunkard that he is. It is all my work - every bit of it - as you see it now."

        He paused, but her eyes clung to the withered fern, and so quiet was her figure that it seemed as if she had not drawn breath since he began. Her faint smile was still sketched about the corners of her mouth, and her fingers were closed upon the brim of his harvest hat.

        "For five years I was like that," he went on again. "I did not know, I did not care - I wanted to be a beast. Then you came and it was different."

        For the first time she turned and looked at him.

        "And it was different?" she repeated beneath her breath.

        "Oh, there's nothing to say that will make things better: I know that. If you had not come I should never have known myself nor what I had been. It was like a thunderclap - the whole thing; it shook me off my feet before I saw what it meant - before I would acknowledge even to myself that - "

        "That?" she questioned in a whisper, for he had bitten back the words.

        "That I love you."

        As he spoke she slipped suddenly to her knees and lay with her face hidden on the old log, while her smothered sobs ran in long shudders through her body. A murmur reached him presently, and it seemed to him that she was praying softly in her clasped hands; but when in a new horror of himself he made a movement to rise and slip away, she

looked up and gently touched him detainingly on the arm.

        "Oh, how unhappy - how unhappy you have been!" she said.

        "It is not that I mind," he answered. "If I could take all the misery of it I shouldn't care, but I have made you suffer, and for the sin that is mine alone."

        For a moment she was silent, breathing quickly between parted lips; then turning with an impulsive gesture, she laid her cheek upon the hand hanging at his side.

        "Not yours alone," she said softly, "for it has become mine, too."

        Before the wonder of her words he stared at her with dazed eyes, while their meaning shook him slowly to his senses.

        "Maria!" he called out sharply in the voice of one who speaks from a distance.

        She met his appeal with a swift outward movement of her arms, and, bending over, laid her hands gently upon his head.

        "Mine, too, Christopher - mine, too," she repeated, "for I take the blame of it, and I will share in the atonement. My dear, my dear, is love so slight a thing that it would share the joy and leave the sorrow - that it would take the good and reject the evil? Why, it is all mine! All! All! What you have been I was also; what I am to-day you will be. I have been yours since the first instant you looked upon me."

        With a sob he caught her hands and crushed them in his own.

        "Then this is love, Maria?"

        "It has been love - always."

        "From the first - as with me?"

        "As with you. Beloved, there is not a wrong on this earth that could come between us now, for there is no room in my heart where it might enter. There can be no sin against love which love does not acknowledge."

        Falling apart, their hands dropped before them, and they stood looking at each other in a silence that went deeper than words. She felt his gaze enveloping her in warmth from head to foot, but he still made no movement to draw nearer, for there are moments when the touch of the flesh grows meaningless before the mute appeal of the spirit. In that one speechless instant there passed between them the pledges and the explanations of years.

        Suddenly the light flamed in his face, and opening his arms, he made a single step toward her; but, melting into tears, she turned from him and ran out into the road.

CHAPTER III
WILL S RUIN

        Will was sitting idly on an overturned wheel-barrow beside the woodpile, and as she approached him she assumed with an effort a face of cheerful courage.

        "Oh, Will, I thought you'd gone to work. You promised me!"

        "Well, I haven't, and there's an end of it," he returned irritably, chewing hard on a chip he had picked up from the ground; "and what's more, I

shan't go till I see the use. It's killing me by inches. I tell you I'm not strong enough to stand a life like this. Drudge, drudge, drudge; there's nothing else except the little spirit I get from drink."

        "And that ruins you. Oh, don't, don't. I'll go on my knees to you; I'll work for you like a servant day and night; I'll sell my very clothes to help you, if you'll only promise me never to drink again."

        "You a servant!" said Will, and laughed shortly while he looked her over with raised eyebrows. "Why, your stockings would keep me in cigarettes for a week."

        A flush crossed Maria's face, and she glanced down guiltily, letting her black skirt fall above the lace upon her petticoat. "I have bought nothing since coming home," she responded presently with quiet dignity; "these belong, with my old luxuries, to a past life. There were a great many of them, and it will fortunately take me a long time to wear them out."

        "Oh, I don't begrudge them," returned Will, a little ashamed of his show of temper; "fine clothes suit you, and I hope you will squeeze them out of grandpa all you can. It's as good a way for him to spend his money as any other, and it doesn't hurt me so long as he'll never let me see the colour of a cent."

        "But your promise, dear? Will you promise me?"

        He lifted his sullen face toward her kind eyes, then turning away, kicked listlessly at the rotting chips.

        "What's the use in promising? I wouldn't keep it," he replied. "Why, there are times when but

for whisky I'd go mad. It's the life, I tell you, that's killing me, not drink. If things were different I shouldn't crave it - I shouldn't miss it, even. Why, for three months after I married Molly I didn't touch a single drop, and I'd have kept it up, too, except for grandpa's devilment. It's his fault; he drove me back to it as clear as day."

        His weak mouth quivered, and he sucked in his breath in the way he had inherited from Fletcher. The deep flush across his face faded slowly, and dropping his restless, bloodshot eyes, he dug his foot into the mould with spasmodic twitches of his body. His clothes appeared to have been flung upon him, and his cravat and loosened collar betrayed the lack of neatness which had always repelled Maria so strongly in her grandfather. As she watched him she wondered with a pang that she had never noticed until to-day the resemblance he bore to the old man at the Hall.

        "But one must be patient, Will," she said helplessly after a moment's thought; "there's always hope of a mending - and as far as that goes, grandfather may relent to-morrow."

        "Relent? Pshaw! I'd like to see him do it this side of hell. Let him die: that's all I ask of him. His room is a long sight better than his company, and you may tell him I said so."

        "What good would come of that?"

        "I don't want any good to come of it. Why should I? He's brought me to this pass with his own hand."

        "But surely it was partly your fault. He loved you once."

        "Nonsense. He wanted a dog to badger, that was all. Christopher Blake said so."

        "Christbpher Blake! Oh, Will, Will, if you could only understand!"

        She turned hopelessly away from him and looked with despairing eyes over the ploughed fields which blushed faintly in the sunshine.

        "So your spring ploughing is all done," she said at last, desisting from her attempt to soften his sullen obduracy, "and you have been working harder than I knew."

        "Oh, it's not I," returned Will promptly, his face clearing for the first time. "It's all Christopher's work; he ploughed that field just before he went away. Do you see that new cover over the well? He knocked that up the last morning he was here, and made those steps before the front door at the same time. Now, he's the kind of friend worth having, and no mistake. But for him I'd have landed in the poorhouse long ago."

        Maria's gaze left the field and returned to Will's face, where it lingered wistfully.

        "Have you ever heard what it was all about, Will?" she asked, "the old trouble between him and grandfather?"

        "Some silly property right, I believe; I can't remember. Did you ever see anybody yet with whom grandpa was on decent terms?"

        "He used to be with you, Will."

        "Only so long as I wore short breeches and he could whack me over the head whenever he had a mind to. I tell you I'd rather try to get along with Beelzebub himself."

        "Have you ever tried peace-making in earnest, I wonder?"

        Twirling a chip between his thumb and forefinger, he flirted it angrily at a solitary hen scratching in the mould.

        "Why, shortly after my marriage I went over there and positively wiped up the floor with myself. I offered him everything under heaven in the shape of good behaviour, and, by Jove! I meant it, too. I'd have stopped drinking then; I'd even have given up Christopher Blake "

        "Did you tell him that?"

        "Did I ever tell a thunderstorm I'd run indoors? It was enough to get away with a whole skin - he left me little more. And the day afterward, by the way, he sent me the deeds to this rotten farm, and warned me that he'd shoot me down if I ever set foot at the Hall."

        "And there has been no softening - no wavering since?"

        Will shook his head with a brutal laugh. "Oh, you heard of our meeting in the road and what came of it. I told him I was starving: he answered that he wasn't responsible for all the worthless paupers in the county. Then I cursed him, and he broke his stick on my shoulders. I say, Maria," he wound up desperately, "do you think he'll live forever?"

        She kept her eyes upon him without answering, fearing to tell him that by the terms of the new will he could never come into his share of Fletcher's wealth.

        "Has he ever seen Molly?" she asked suddenly,

while an unreasonable hope shot through her heart. "Does he know about the child?"

        "He may have seen her - I don't know; but she's not so much to look at now: she's gone all to pieces under this awful worry. It isn't my fault, God knows, but she expected different things when she married me. She thought we'd live somewhere in the city and that she'd have pretty clothes to wear."

        "I was thinking that when the child came he might forgive you," broke in Maria almost cheerfully.

        "And in the meantime we're to die like rats. Oh, there's no use talking, it's got to end one way or another. There's not a cent in the house nor a decent scrap of food, and Molly is having to see the doctor every day. I declare, it's enough to drive me clean to desperation!"

        "And what good would that do Molly or yourself? Be a man, Will, and don't let a woman hear you whine. Now I'm going in to see her, and I'll stay to help her about supper."

        She nodded brightly, and, opening the little door of the house, passed into the single lower room which served as kitchen and dining-room in one. Beyond the disorderly table, from which the remains of dinner had not yet been cleared away, Molly was lying on a hard wooden lounge covered with strips of faded calico. Her abundant flaxen hair hung in lusterless masses upon her shoulders, and the soiled cotton wrapper she wore was torn open at the throat as if she had clutched it in a passion of childish petulance. At Maria's entrance she started and looked up angrily from her dejected attitude.

        "I can't see any visitors - I'm not fit!" she cried.

        Maria drew forward a broken split-bottomed chair and sat down beside the lounge.

        "I'm not a visitor, Molly," she answered; "and I've come to see if I can't make you a little easier. Won't you let me fix you comfortably? Why, you poor child, your hands are as hot as fire!"

        "I'm hot all over," returned Molly peevishly; "and I'm sick - I'm as sick as I can be. Will won't believe it, but the doctor says so."

        "Will does believe it, and it worries him terribly. Here, sit up and let me bathe your face and hands in cold water. Doesn't that feel better?"

        "A little," admitted Molly, when Maria had found a towel and dried her hands.

        "And now I'm going to comb the tangles out of your hair. What lovely hair! It is the colour of ripe corn."

        A pleased flush brightened Molly's face, and she resigned herself easily to Maria's willing services. "There's a comb over there on that shelf under the mirror," she said. "Will broke half the teeth out of it the other day, and it pulls my hair out when I use it."

        "Then I'll bring you one of mine. You must be careful of these curls. They're too pretty to treat roughly. Do I hurt you?"

        As she spoke, a bright strand of the girl's hair twisted about one of her rings, and after hesitating an instant she drew the circle from her finger and laid it in Molly's lap.

        "There. I haven't any money, so that's to buy you medicine and food," she said. "It cost a good deal once, I fancy."

        "Diamonds!" gasped Molly, with a cry of rapture.

Her hand closed over the ring with a frantic clutch; then slipping it on, she lay watching the stone sparkle in the last sunbeams. A colour had bloomed suddenly in her face, and her eyes shone with a light as brilliant as that of the jewel at which she gazed.

        "And you had - others?" she asked in a kind of sacred awe.

        "A great many once - a necklace, and rings, and brooches, and a silly tiara that made me look a fright. I never cared for them after the novelty of owning them wore off. They are evil things, it seems to me, and should never be the gifts of love, for each one of those foolish stones stands for greed, and pride, and selfishness, and maybe crime. That was my way of looking at them, of course, and whenever I wore my necklace I used to feel like asking pardon of every beggar that I passed. 'One link in this chain might make a man of you,' was what I wanted to say - but I never did. Well, they are almost all gone now; some I sold and some I gave away. This one will buy you medicine, I hope, and then it will give me more happiness than it has ever done before."

        "Oh, it is beautiful, beautiful," sighed Molly beneath her breath, and then went to the little cracked mirror in the corner and held the diamond first to her ear and then against her hair. "They suit me," she said at last, opening the bosom of her wrapper and trying it on her pretty throat; "they would make me look so splendid. Oh, if I'd only had a lover who could give me things like this!"

        Maria, watching her, felt her heart contract suddenly

with a pang of remembrance. Jewels had been the one thing which Jack Wyndham had given her, for of the finer gifts of the spirit he had been beggared long before she knew him. In the first months of his infatuation he had showered her with diamonds, and she had grown presently to see a winking mockery in each bauble that he tossed her. Before the first year was ended she had felt her pride broken by the oppressiveness of the jewels that bedecked her body, like the mystic princess who was killed at last by the material weight of the golden crown upon her brow.

        "They could never make you happy, Molly. How could they? Come back and lie down, and let me put the ring away. Perhaps I'd better take it to town myself." But Molly would not open her closed hand on which the diamond shone, and long after Maria had cooked supper and gone back to the Hall the girl lay motionless, holding the ring against the light. When Will came in from milking she showed it to him with a burst of joy.

        "Look! Oh, look! Isn't it like the sun?"

        He eyed it critically.

        "By Jove! It must have cost cool hundreds! I'll take it to town to-morrow and bring back the things you need. It will get the baby clothes, too, so you won't have to bother about the sewing."

        "You shan't! You shan't!" cried Molly in a passion of sobs. "It's mine. She gave it to me, and you shan't take it away. I don't want the medicine: it never does me any good; and I can make the baby clothes out of my old things. I'll never, never give it up!"

        For an instant Will stared at her as if she had lost her senses.

        "Well, she was a fool to let you get it," he said, as he flung himself out of the room.

CHAPTER IV
IN WHICH MRS. BLAKE'S EYES ARE OPENED

        Reaching the yard, he saw Tucker sitting placidly on his bench, and, crossing the long grass, he flung

himself down beside him with a sigh of pleasure in the beauty of the scene.

        "You're right, Uncle Tucker; it's all wonderful. I never saw such a sunset in my life."

        "Ah, but you haven't seen it yet," said Tucker. "I've been looking at it since it first caught that pile of clouds, and it grows more splendid every instant. I'm not an overreligious body, I reckon, and I've always held that the best compliment you can pay God Almighty is to let Him go His own gait and quit advising Him; but, I declare, as I sat here just now I couldn't help being impertinent enough to pray that I might live to see another."

        "Well, it's a first-rate one; that's so. It seems to shake a body out of the muck, somehow."

        "I shouldn't wonder if it did; and that's what I told two young fools who were up here just now asking me to patch up their first married quarrel. 'For heaven's sake, stop playing with mud and sit down and watch that sunset,' I said to 'em, and if you'll believe it, the girl actually dropped her jaws and replied she had to hurry back to shell her beans while the light lasted. Beans! Why, they'll make beans enough of their marriage, and so I told 'em."

        Tapping his crutch gently on the ground, he paused and sat smiling broadly at the sunset.

        For a time Christopher watched with him while the gold-and-crimson glory flamed beyond the twisted boughs of the old pine; then, turning his troubled face on Tucker's cheerful one, he asked deliberately:

        "Do you sometimes regret that you never married, Uncle Tucker?"

        "Regret?" repeated Tucker softly. "Why, no. I

haven't time for it - there's too much else to think about. Regret is a dangerous thing, my boy; you let a little one no bigger than a mustard seed into your heart, and before you know it you've hatched out a whole brood. Why, if I began to regret that, heaven knows where I should stop. I'd regret my leg and arm next, the pictures I might have painted, and the four years' war which we might have won. No, no. I'd change nothing, I tell you - not a day; not an hour; not a single sin nor a single virtue. They're all woven into the pattern of the whole, and I reckon the Lord knew the figure He had in mind."

        "Well, I'd like to pull a thread or two out of it," returned Christopher moodily, squinting his eyes at the approaching form of Susan Spade, who came from the afterglow through the whitewashed gate. "Why, what's bringing her, I wonder?" he asked with evident displeasure.

        To this inquiry Susan herself presently made answer as she walked with her determined tread across the little yard.

        "I've a bit of news for you, Mr. Christopher, an' I reckon you'd ruther have it from my mouth than from Bill Fletcher's. His back's up agin, the Lord knows why, an' he's gone an' moved his pasture fence so as to take in yo' old field that lies beside it. He swars it's his, too, but Tom's ready to match him with a bigger oath that it's yours an' always has been."

        "Of course it's mine," said Christopher coolly. "The meadow brook marks the boundary, and the field is on this side. I can prove it by Tom or Jacob Weatherby to-morrow."

        "Well, he's took it" rejoined Mrs. Spade flatly.

        "He won't keep it long, I reckon, ma'am," said Tucker, in his pleasant manner; "and I must say it seems to me that Bill Fletcher is straining at a gnat. Why, he has near two thousand acres, hasn't he? And what under heaven does he want with that old field the sheep have nibbled bare? There's no sense in it."

        "It ain't sense, it's natur," returned Mrs. Spade, sitting squarely down on the bench from which Christopher had risen; "an' that's what I've had ag'in men folks from the start - thar's too much natur in 'em. You kin sheer it out of a woman, an' you kin beat it out of a dog, an' thar're times when you kin even spank it out of a baby, but if you oust it from a man thar ain't nothin' but skin en' bones left behind. An' natur's a ticklish thing to handle without gloves, bless yo' soul, suh. It's like a hive of bees: you give it a little poke to start it, en' the first thing you know it's swarmin' all over both yo' hands. It's a skeery thing, suh, an' Bill Fletcher's got his share of it, sho's you're born."

        "It has its way with him pretty thoroughly, I think," responded Tucker, chuckling; "but if I were you, Christopher, I'd stick up for my rights in that old field. Bill Fletcher may need exercise, but there's no reason he should get it by trampling over you."

        "Oh, I'll throw his fence down, never fear," answered Christopher indifferently. "He knew it, I dare say, when he put it up."

        "It's a fuss he wants, suh, an' nothing else," declared Mrs. Spade, smoothing down the starched

fold of her gingham apron; "an' if he doesn't git it, po' creetur, he's goin' to be laid up in bed befo' the week is out. He's bilin' hot inside, I can see that in his face, an' if the steam don't work out one way it will another. When a man ain't got a wife or child to nag at he's mighty sho' to turn right round an' begin naggin' at his neighbours, an' that's why it's the bounder duty of every decent woman to marry an' save the peace. Why, if Tom hadn't had me to worry on, I reckon he'd be the biggest blusterer in this county or the next."

        Leaving her still talking, Christopher went from her into the house, where he lingered an instant with drawn breath before his mother's door. The old lady was sleeping tranquilly, and, treading softly in his heavy boots, he passed out to the friendly faces of the horses and the cool dusk of the stable.

        As the days went on, drawing gradually toward summer, Mrs. Blake's life began peacefully to flicker out, like a candle that has burned into the socket. There were hours when her mind was quite clear, and at such times she would talk unceasingly in her old sprightly fashion, with her animated gestures and her arch and fascinating smile. But following these sanguine periods there would come whole days when she lay unconscious and barely taking breath, while her features grew sharp and wan under the pallid skin.

        It was when she had just passed through one of these states that Lila came out on a Sunday afternoon to find Christopher at the woodpile, and told him, with a burst of tears, that she thought the end had come.

        "She's quite herself and wants us all," she said, sobbing. "And she's even asked for the house servants, every one - for Phyllis, and Tobias, and so many of them who have been away for years. It's just as if she knew that she was dying and wanted to say good-by."

        Throwing the axe hurriedly aside, Christopher followed her into the house, and then entering the old lady's room, stopped short beside the threshold in a grief that was not unmixed with wonder.

        The sunshine fell straight through the window on the high white pillows, and among them Mrs. Blake was sitting rigidly, her blind eyes sparkling with the last fitful return of her intelligence. She was speaking, as he entered, in a natural and lively tone, which brought back to him his earliest memories of her engaging brightness.

        "Are the servants all there, Cynthia? Then let them come and stand inside the door - a few at a time."

        "They are here, mother," replied Cynthia, choking; and Christopher, glancing round, saw several decrepit Negroes leaning against the wall - Uncle Boaz, Docia (pressing her weak heart), and blear-eyed Aunt Polly, already in her dotage.

        "I wish to tell you good-by while my mind is clear," pursued the old lady in her high, sweet voice. "You have been good servants to me for a long time, and I hope you will live many years to serve my children as faithfully. Always remember, Christopher - Is Christopher there?"

        "I am here, dear mother."

        "Always remember that a man's first duty is to

his wife and children, and his second to his slaves. The Lord has placed them in your hands, and you must answer to Him how you fulfill the trust. And now, Boaz - where is Boaz?"

        "I'm yer, ole miss; I'm right yer"

        "You may shake my hand, Boaz, for it is a long good-by. I've always promised you your freedom, and I haven't forgotten it, though you asked for it almost fifty years ago. You did something that I praised you for - I can't quite remember what it was - and when I asked you what you would like as a reward, you answered: 'Don't give me nothin' now, ole miss, but let the gift grow and set me free when you come to die.' It is a long time, Boaz, fifty years, but I give you your freedom now, as I promised, though it is very foolish of you to want it, and I'm sure you'll find it nothing but a burden and a trouble. Christopher, will you remember that Boaz is free?"

        Christopher crossed the room, and, catching her hands in his own, sought to force her back upon the pillows, but with an effort that showed in every tense line of her face she pushed him from her and sat erect and unsupported.

        "Let me dismiss them first," she said with her stately manner. "Good-by, Phyllis and Polly - and - and - all the rest of you. You may go now. I am a little tired, and I will lie down."

        Cynthia put the weeping servants from the room, and, filling a glass with brandy, held it with a shaking hand to her mother's lips.

        "Take this, dear, and lie down," she said.

        Mrs. Blake sipped the brandy obediently, but as

she felt her strength revive from the strong spirit the animation reawoke in her face, and, turning toward Christopher, she stretched out her hand with an appealing gesture.

        "There is so much to say and I haven't the space to say it in, my son. There is so much advice I want to give you, but the time is short."

        "I understand, mother; I understand. Don't let it trouble you."

        "I have had a fortunate life, my child," resumed the old lady, waving him to silence with a gesture in which there was still a feeble sprightliness, "and when one has lived happily far into the seventies one learns a great deal of wisdom, and there is much good advice that one ought to leave behind. You have been an affectionate son to me, Christopher, and I have not yet given up the hope that you may live to be a worthy husband to another woman. If you do marry - and God grant that you may - remember that the chief consideration should be family connection, and the next personal attractiveness. Wealth counts for very little beside good birth, and after this I regard a small foot and hand as most essential. They have always been a mark of our breeding, Christopher, and I should not like the family to lose through you one of its most distinguished characteristics."

        "It is not likely I shall marry, mother. I was cut out for different ends."

        "One never knows, my son, and at least I am only doing my duty in speaking to you thus. I am a very old woman, and I am not afraid to die, for I have never to my knowledge done anything

that was unbecoming in a lady. Remember to be a gentleman, and you will find that that embraces all morality and a good deal of religion."

        He kissed her hand, watching anxiously the mounting excitement in her face.

        "And if you do marry, Christopher," she went on, harping fitfully on her favourite string, "remember that keeping in love is as much the profession for a man as it is the art for a woman, and that love feeds on little delicacies rather than on meat and drink. Don't forget the little things, dear, and the big ones will take care of themselves. I have seen much of men and manners in my life, and they have taught me that it is the small failings, not the big faults, which are deadliest to love. Why, I've seen a romantic passion survive shame, and treachery, and even blows, and another wither out of existence before the first touch of bad breeding. 'A man's table manners are a part of his morality,' your Great-grandfather Bolivar used to say."

        She laughed softly while her hand played with the white fringe on the counterpane.

        "I can recall now the sympathy I felt for Matty Gordon," she pursued, "a great belle and beauty who ran off and married that scamp, Aleck Douglas. He turned into a perfect rascal, they said, though I must admit that he made a very amiable husband, and never stinted her, even if he stole from other people. Well, she stuck to him through good and evil report, and was really from all appearances a most contented woman. When he died at last, people said that it was just in time to escape the penitentiary, but to see Matty you would have

thought she had lost nothing short of pure perfection. Poor old Bishop Deane, who always would speak his mind, in the pulpit or out of it, went to call on her, he told me, and took occasion to reprove her for such excessive grief over so unworthy an object. 'He was not an upright man, Matty, and you know it,' he began quite boldly; 'he was a libertine, and a gambler, and an open scoffer at religion.' But Matty went on sobbing harder than ever, and at last, getting angry, he said sternly: 'And more than this, ma'am, he was, as you know, a faithless and disloyal husband!' Then the poor girl drew out a pocket handkerchief with a three-inch black border and mopped her pretty blue eyes. 'Ah, but, Bishop, I had so much to be thankful for!' she said. 'He never chewed tobacco!' Well well, she may have been a fool, as the Bishop insisted, but he was a man, in spite of his cloth, and could never learn to understand a woman's sensibilities."

        She finished, and, turning, touched him gently on the hand.

        "It is the little things that count in marriage Christopher," and after a moment she added thoughtfully: "Promise me that you will always use an ash-tray."

        "Anything, dear mother; I promise anything."

        With a contented sigh she closed her eyes, and still holding his hand, fell into a broken and troubled sleep, from which she awoke presently in a gentle delirium. Her lost youth had returned to her, and with it something of her old gaiety of manner. Suddenly he felt a strange thrill pass through her,

and raising herself with a last great endeavour, she sat erect, staring into the blue sky that showed through the window.

        "I am engaged for this set, sir," she said in her winning voice, while a girlish smile transfigured her wan face, "but if it pleases you, you may put your name down for the next." Rising, he bent quickly over her, but before he touched her she had fallen back upon the pillows and lay with her arch smile frozen upon her face.

CHAPTER V
CHRISTOPHER PLANTS BY MOONLIGHT

        "Well, she knows all now," he thought in bitterness. "She knows the theft of the diamond, and the deception that lasted nearly thirty years." In the midst of his sorrow a sudden shame possessed

him, and he felt all at once that his heart was pierced by the unearthly keenness of the dead eyes. "She knows all now," he repeated, and there was a passionate defiance in his acknowledgment. "She knows all that I have hidden from her, as well as much that has been hidden from me. Her blind eyes are open, and she sees at last my failure and my sin, and the agony that I have known. For years I have shielded her, but she cannot shield me now, for all her wider vision. She can avert my fate no more than I could hold her back from hers. We are each alone - she, and I, and Maria, and the boy whom I have ruined - and there is no love that can keep a man from living and dying to himself."

        It seemed to him, sitting there in the shadow, that he felt - as he had felt before in grave moments - the revolutions of the wheel on which he was bound. And with that strange mystic insight which comes to those who lead brooding and isolated lives close to Nature, he asked himself if, after all, these things had not had their beginning in the dawn of his existence so many million years ago. "Has it not all happened before as it happens now - my shame and my degradation, the kiss I placed on Maria's lips, and the watch I keep by the deathbed of my mother? It is all familiar to me, and when the end comes, that will be familiar, too."

        A night moth entered, wheeling in dizzy circles about the candle, but when it went so near as to scorch its wings he caught it gently in his hollowed palms and released it into the darkness of the yard. As he leaned out he saw the light shining clear in Maria's window, and while he gazed upon it he felt

a curious kinship with the moth that had flown in from the night and hovered about the flame.

        As the days went on, the emptiness in the house became to him like that of the grave, and he learned presently that the peevish and exacting old lady who had not stirred for years from her sick-bed had left a vacancy larger than all the rest of them could fill. Cynthia, who had borne most of the burden, began now to bear, in its place, the heavier share of the loss. Released from her daily sacrifice and her patient drudgery, she looked about her with dazed eyes, like one whose future has been suddenly swept away. There was nothing for her to do any longer - no risings in the gray dawn to prepare the day's stealthy work, no running on aching feet to answer unreasonable complaints, no numberless small lies to plan in secret, no stinting of herself that her mother might have her little luxuries. Her work was over, and she pined away in the first freedom of her life. The very fact that deception was no longer necessary seemed to sweep her accustomed moorings from beneath her feet. She had lied so long that lying had become at last a second nature to her, and to her surprise she found almost an indecency in the aspect of the naked truth.

        "I don't know how it is, Uncle Tucker," she said one day toward the end of June, when the deadly drought which had kept back the transplanting of the tobacco had ended in three days of heavy rain - "I don't know how it is, but the thing I miss most - and I miss her every minute - is the lying I had to do. It gave me something to think about, somehow. I used to

stay awake at night and plan all sorts of pleasant lies that I could tell about the house and the garden, and the way the war ended, and the Presidents of the Confederacy - I made up all their names - and the fuss with which each one was inaugurated, and the dresses their wives and daughters wore. It's all so dull when you have to stop pretending and begin to face things just as they are. I've lied for almost thirty years, and I reckon I've lost my taste for the truth."

        "Well, it will come back, dear," responded Tucker reassuringly; "but I think you need a change if a woman ever did. What about that week you're to spend with the Weatherbys?"

        "I'm going to-morrow," answered Cynthia shortly. "Lila is sick with a cold and wants me; but how you and Christopher will manage to get on is more than I can say."

        "Oh, we'll worry along with Docia, never fear," replied Tucker, hobbling into his seat at the supper table, as Christopher came in from the woods with the heavy moisture dripping from his clothes.

        "It's cleared off fine and there's to be a full moon to-night," said the young man, hanging up his hat. "If the rain had come a week later the tobacco would have been ruined. I've just been taking it up out of the plant-bed."

        "You'll begin setting it out to-morrow, I reckon, then," observed Tucker, watching Cynthia as she cut up his food.

        "Oh, I'm afraid to wait - the ground dries so quickly. Jacob Weatherby is going to set his out to-night, and I think I'll do the same. There's a

fine moon, and I shouldn't wonder if every farmer in the county was in the fields till daybreak."

        He ate his supper hurriedly, and then, taking down his hat, went out to resume his work. At the door he had left his big split basket of plants, and, slipping his arm through the handle, he crossed the yard in the direction of the field. As he turned into the little path which trailed in wet grass along the "worm" fence, Jacob Weatherby came stepping briskly through the mud in the road and stopped to ask him if he had got his ground ready for the setting out. "I've been lookin' for hands myself," added the old man in his cheery voice, "for I could find work for a dozen men to-night, but to save my life I can't scrape up more'n a nigger here an' thar. Bill Fletcher has been out ahead of me, it seems."

        "Well, I'll be able to help you to-morrow, I think," answered Christopher. "I hope to get my own work done to-night." Then he asked with a trifling hesitation: "How is Lila's cold?"

        A sudden light broke over old Jacob's face, and he nodded in his genial fashion.

        "Ah, bless her pretty eyes, I sometimes think she's too good to put her foot down on this here common earth," he said, "an' to think that only this mornin' she was wantin' to help Sarah wipe the dishes. Why, I reckon Sarah would ruther work her fingers to the bone than have that gal take a single dishcloth in her hand. Oh, we know how to value her, Mr. Christopher, never fear. Her word's law in our house, and always will be."

        He passed on with his hearty chuckle, and Christopher followed the wet path and began planting his

tobacco plants in the small holes he bored in the moist earth.

        It was the most solemn hour of day, when the division between light and darkness seems less a gradation than a sudden blur. A faint yellow line still lingered across the western horizon, and against it the belt of pines rose like an advancing army. The wind, which blew toward him from the woods, filled his nostrils with a spicy tang.

        Slowly the moon rose higher, flooding the hollows and the low green hills with light. In the outlying fields around the Hall he saw Fletcher's planters at work in the tobacco, each man so closely followed by his shadow that it was impossible at a little distance to distinguish the living labourer from his airy double. All the harsh irregularities of the landscape were submerged in a general softness of tone, and the shapes of hill and meadow, of road and tree, of shrub and rock, were dissolved in a magical and enchanting beauty.

        Several hours had passed, and he had stopped to rest a moment from his planting, when Maria came in the moonlight along the road and paused breathlessly to lean upon the fence beneath the locust tree.

        "It is the first time I've been out for two weeks," she said, panting softly. "I twisted my ankle, and the worst part was that I didn't even dare to send you word. What must you have thought?"

        "No harm of you," he answered, and threw down the fence-rails that she might cross. "Come over to me, Maria."

        Putting her hands in his, she passed over the lowered fence, and then stood at arm's length looking

into his face, which the moonlight had softened to a beauty that brought to her mind a carving in old ivory.

        "I still limp a little," she went on, smiling, "and I had to steal out like a thief and run through the shadows. To find me with you would be the death of grandfather, I believe. Something has occurred to put him in a fresh rage with you."

        "It was the field by the pasture," he told her frankly. "You know it belongs to me, and pure justice made me throw down his fence; but if you wish it I will put it up again. I'll do anything you wish."

        She thought for a moment with that complete detachment of judgment from emotion which is so rarely a part of a woman's intellect.

        "No, no," she said; "it is right that you should take it down. I would not have you submit to any further injustice, not even a little one like that."

        "And this will go on forever! Oh, Maria, how will it end?"

        "We must wait and hope, dear; you see that."

        "I see nothing but that I love you and am most miserable," he answered desperately.

        A smile curved her lips. "Oh, blind and faithless, I see only you!"

        He was still holding her hands, but, dropping them as she spoke, he threw his arms wide open and stood waiting.

        "Then come to me, my dearest; come to me."

        His voice rang out in command rather than entreaty, and he stood smiling gravely as, hesitating a breathless instant, she regarded him with eyes

that struggled to be calm. Then slowly the radiance which was less the warmth of colour than of expression flooded her face, and she bent toward him as if impelled by some strong outside force. The next moment the storm swept her roughly from her feet and crushed back her pleading hands upon her bosom; bewildered, flushed, and trembling, she lay upon his breast while their lips clung together. "Oh, my friend, my lover," she murmured faintly.

        He felt her resistance dissolve within his arms and it was a part of the tragedy of their love that there should come to him no surprise when he found her mouth salt from her tears. The shadow of a great evil, of a secret anguish, still divided them, and it was this that gave to their embraces the sorrowful passion which he drew from her despairing kiss.

        "You cannot love me, Maria. How can it be true?"

        Releasing herself, she put her hand upon his lips to silence him.

        "You have made your confession," she said earnestly, with the serene dignity which had impressed him in the first moment of their meeting, "and now I will make mine. You must not stop me; you must not look at me until I finish. Promise."

        "I promise to keep silent," he answered, with his gaze upon her.

        She drew away from him, keeping her eyes full on his, and holding him at arm's length with the tips of her fingers. He felt that she was still shaken by his embrace - that she was still in a quiver from his

kisses; but to all outward seeming she had regained the noble composure of her bearing.

        "No, no. Ah, listen, my friend, and do not touch me. What I must tell you is this, and you must hear me patiently to the end. I have loved you always - from the first day; since the beginning. There has never been any one else, and there has never been a moment in my life when I would not have followed you had you lifted a finger - anywhere. At first I did not know - I did not believe it. It was but a passing fancy, I thought, that you had murdered. I taught myself to believe that I was cold, inhuman, because I did not warm to other men. Oh, I did not know then that I was not stone, but ice, which would melt at the first touch of the true flame - "

        "Maria!" he burst out in a cry of anguish.

        "Hush! Hush! Remember your promise. It was not until afterward," she went on in the same quiet voice; "it was not until my marriage - not until my soul shuddered back from his embraces and I dreamed of you, that I began to see - to understand."

        "Oh, Maria, my beloved, if I had known!"

        She still held him from her with her outstretched arm.

        "It was the knowledge of this that made me feel that I had wronged him - that I had defrauded him of the soul of love and given him only the poor flesh. It was this that held me to him all those wretched Years - that kept me with him till the end, even through his madness. At last I buried your memory told myself that I had forgotten."

        "We will let the world go, dearest," he said passionately. "Come to me."

        But she shook her head, and, still smiling, held him at a distance.

        "It will never go," she answered, "for it is not the world's way. But whatever comes to us, there is one thing you must remember - that you must never forget for one instant while you live. In good or evil, in life or death, there is no height so high nor any depth so low that I will not follow you."

        Then waving him from her with a decisive gesture, she turned from him and went swiftly home across the moonlit fields.

CHAPTER VI
TREATS OF THE TRAGEDY WHICH WEARS A COMIC MASK

        "I say, Maria, I've been waiting hours to speak to you."

        Forcing back the cry upon her lips, she opened the door and stole softly into the kitchen. Then, turning, she faced Will with a frightened gesture.

        "How reckless - how very reckless!" she exclaimed in a whisper.

        He closed the door that led up into the house, and coming over to the stove, where the remains of a fire still smouldered in a deep red glow, stood looking at her with nervous twitches of his reddened eyelids. There was a wildness in his face before which she fell back appalled, and his whole appearance, from the damp hair lying in streaks upon his forehead to his restless feet which he shuffled continually as he

talked, betrayed an agitation so extreme as to cause her a renewed pang of foreboding.

        "Oh, Will, you have been drinking again!" she said, in the same frightened whisper.

        "And why not?" he demanded, throwing out his words between thick breaths. "What business is it of yours or of anybody else's if I have been? A pretty sister you are - aren't you? - to let a fellow rot away on a tobacco farm while you wear diamonds on your fingers."

        She looked at him steadily for a moment, and his shifting glance fell slowly to the floor.

        "If you are in any fresh trouble you may as well tell me at once," she said. "It is a mere waste of time and breath to reproach me. You can't possibly make me angry to-night, for I wear an armour of which you do not dream, and so little a thing as abuse does not even touch me. Besides, grandfather may hear us and come down at any moment. So speak quickly."

        Her coolness sobered him instantly, as if a splash of ice-water had been thrown into his face, and his tone lost its aggressiveness and sank into a whimpering complaint.

        It was the same old thing, he went on, only worse and worse. Molly had been ill again, and the doctor ordered medicine he couldn't buy. Yes, he had tried to take the diamond from her, but she flew into hysterics at the mere mention of selling it. Once he had dragged it off her finger, and had given it back again because her wildness frightened him. "Why on earth did you ever let her have it?" he finished querulously.

        "Well, I never imagined she would be quite so silly," returned Maria, distressed by what she heard. "But it may be that jewels are really her passion, and the bravest of us, I suppose, are those who sacrifice most for their dearest desire. I really don't see what is to be done, Will. I haven't any money, and I don't dare ask grandfather, for he makes me keep a strict account of every cent I spend. Only yesterday he told me he couldn't allow me but two postage stamps a week, and yet I believe that he is worth considerably more than half a million dollars. Sometimes I think it is nothing short of pure insanity, he grows so miserly about little things. Aunt Saidie and I have both noticed that he would rather spend a hundred dollars - though it is like drawing out an eyetooth - than keep a pound of fresh butter from the market."

        "And yet he likes you?"

        "Oh, he tolerates me, as far as that goes; but I don't believe he likes anything on earth except his money. It's his great passion, just as Molly's love of jewelry is hers. There is something so tremendous about it that one can't help respect it. As for me, he only bears with my presence so long as I ask him for absolutely nothing. He knows I have my little property, and we had a dreadful scene when I refused to let him keep my check-book. I gave you all the interest of the last six months, you know, and the other isn't due until November. If he finds out that it goes to you, heaven help us!"

        "And there's not the faintest hope of his coming to his senses? Have you spoken of me again?"

        "I've mentioned your name twice, that was all.

He rose and stamped out of the room, and didn't speak for days. Aunt Saidie and I have planned to bring the baby over when it comes. That may soften him - especially if it should be a boy."

        "Oh, the bottom will drop out of things by that time," he returned savagely, tearing pieces of straw from his worn hat-brim. "If this keeps up much longer, Maria, I warn you now I'll run away. I'll go off some day on a freight train and hide my head until he dies; then I'll come back to enjoy his precious money."

        She sighed, thinking hopelessly of the altered will.

        "And Molly?" she questioned, for lack of a more effectual argument.

        "I can't stop to think of Molly: it drives me mad. What use am I to her, anyway, I'd like to know? She'd be quite as well off without me, for we do nothing but quarrel now night and day; and yet I love her - I love her awfully," he added in a drunken whimper.

        "Oh, Will, Will, be a man for her sake!"

        "I can't; I can't," he protested, his voice rising in anger. "I can't stand the squalor of this life; it's killing me. Why, look at the way I was brought up, never stopping an instant to ask whether I could have a thing I wanted. He had no right to accustom me to luxuries till I couldn't do without them and then throw me out upon the world like this!"

        "Hush! Hush! Your voice is too loud. It will bring him down."

        "I'll be hanged if I care!" he retorted, but involuntarily he lowered his tone.

        "You mustn't stay here five minutes longer,"

urged Maria. "I'll give you a diamond brooch I still have left, and you may take it to town yourself and sell it. Only promise me on your honour that you will spend the money on the things Molly needs."

        "Oh, I promise," he replied roughly. "Where is it?"

        "In my room. I must get it now. Be perfectly quiet until I return."

        Opening the door and closing it carefully behind her, she stole noiselessly up the dark staircase, while Will, twitching nervously, paced restlessly up and down the brick floor. A pile of walnuts which Miss Saidie had been shelling for cake lay on the hearth, and, picking up the heavy old hammer she had used, he cracked a nut and ate it hurriedly. Hungry as he was - for he had not been home to Supper - he found difficulty in swallowing, and, laying the hammer down upon the bricks, he rose and stood waiting beside the stove. Though the night was warm, a shiver ran suddenly through him, and, stirring the fading embers with a splinter of resinous pine, he held out his shaking hands to the blaze.

        In a moment Maria entered and handed him the brooch in a little box.

        "Try to keep up courage, Will," she said, pushing him into the area under the back steps; " and above all things, do not come here again. It is so unsafe."

        He promised lightly that he would not, and then told her good-by with an affectionate pat upon the arm.

        "Well, you are a bully good chap, after all," he added, as he stepped out into the night.

        For a while Maria stood looking after him across

the moonlit fields, and then, even as she turned to enter the house, the last troubled hour was blotted from her consciousness, and she lived over again the moment of Christopher's embrace. With that peculiar power to revive and hold within the memory an instant's emotion which is possessed by ardent and imaginative women, she experienced again all the throbbing exhilaration, all the fulness of being, which had seemed to crowd the heart-beats of so many ordinary years into the single minute that was packed with life. That minute was hers now for all time; it was a possession of which no material loss, no untoward fate could defraud her; and as she felt her steps softly up the dark staircase, it seemed to her that she saw her way by the light of the lamp that was burning in her bosom.

        To her surprise, as she reached the dining-room a candle was thrust out before her, and, illuminated by the trembling flame, she saw the face of Fletcher, hairy, bloated, sinister, with the shadow of evil impulses worked into the mouth and eyes. For a moment he wagged at her in silence, and in the flickering radiance she saw each swollen vein, each gloomy furrow, with exaggerated distinctness. He reminded her vaguely of some hideous gargoyle she had seen hanging from an early Gothic cathedral.

        "So you've taken to gallivanting, like the rest," he observed with coarse pleasantry. "I'd thought you were a staid and sober-minded woman for your years, but it seems that you are of a bunch with all the others."

        "I've been out in the moonlight," answered Maria, while a sensation of sickness stole over her.

"It is as bright as day, but I thought you were in bed long ago."

        "Thar's not much sleep for me during tobacco planting, I kin tell you," rejoined Fletcher; " but as for you, I reckon thar's more beneath your words than you like to own to. You've been over to see that young scamp, ain't you?"

        "I saw him, but I did not go out for that purpose."

        "It's the truth, I reckon, for I've never known you to lie, and I'll be hanged if it ain't that I like about you, after all. You're the only person I kin spot, man or woman, who speaks the truth jest for the darn love of it."

        "And yet I lived a lie for five years," returned Maria quietly.

        "Maybe so, maybe so; but it set on you like the burr on a chestnut, somehow, and when it rolled off thar you were, as clean as ever. Well, you're an honest and spunky woman, and I can't help your traipsing over thar even if I wanted to. But thar's one thing I tell you now right flat - if that young rascal wants to keep a whole skin he'd better stay off this place. I'd shoot him down as soon as I would a sheep-killing hound."

        "Oh, he won't come here," said Maria faintly; and, going into the dining-room, she dropped into a chair and lay with her arms outstretched upon the table. The second shock to her emotional ecstasy had been too much, and the furniture and Fletcher's face and the glare of the candle all spun before her in a sickening confusion.

        After looking at her anxiously an instant, Fletcher poured out a glass of water and begged her to take

a swallow. "Thar, thar, I didn't mean to skeer you," he said kindly. "You mustn't mind my rough-and-ready ways, for I'm a plain man, God knows. If you are sure you feel fainty," he added, "I'll git you a sip of whisky, but it's a pity to waste it unless you have a turn."

        "Oh, I'm all right," answered Maria, sitting up, and returning his inquiring gaze with a shake of the head. "My ankle is still weak, you know, and I felt a sudden twinge from standing on it. What were you looking for at this hour?"

        "Well, I've been out in the air sense supper, and I feel kind of gone. I thought I'd like a bite of something - maybe a scrap of that cold jowl we had for dinner. But I can't find it. Do you reckon Saidie is such a blamed fool as to throw the scraps away?"

        "There's Malindy, you know; she must eat."

        "I'd like to see one nigger eat up half a jowl," grumbled Fletcher, rooting among the dishes in the sideboard. "Thar was a good big hunk of it left, for you didn't touch it. You don't seem to thrive on our victuals," he added bluntly, turning to peer into her face.

        "I'm a small eater; it makes little difference."

        "Well, we mustn't starve you," he said, as he went back to his search; "and if it's a matter of a pound of fresh butter, or a spring chicken, even, I won't let it stand in your way. Why, what's this, I wonder?"

        Ripping out an oath with an angry snort, he drew forth Miss Saidie's walnut cake and held it squarely before the candle. "I declar, if she ain't

been making walnut cake agin, and I told her last week I wan't going to have her wasting all my eggs. Look at it, will you? If she's beat up one egg in that cake she's beat up a dozen, to say nothing of the sugar!"

        "Don't scold her, grandfather. She has a sweet tooth, you know, and it's so hard for her not to make desserts."

        "Pish! Tush! I don't reckon her tooth's any sweeter than mine. I've a powerful taste for trash myself, and always had since the time I overate ripe honey-shucks when I was six months old; but the taste don't make me throw away good money. I'll have no more of this, I tell you, and I've said my say. She can bake a bit of cake once a week if she'll stint herself to an egg or two, but when it comes to mixing up a dozen at a time, I'll be darned if I'll allow it."

        Lifting the plate in one hand, he stood surveying the big cake with disapproving yet admiring eyes. "It would serve her right if I was to eat up every precious crumb," he remarked at last.

        "Suppose you try it," suggested Maria pleasantly. "It would please Aunt Saidie."

        "It ain't to please her," sourly responded Fletcher, as he drove the knife with a lunge into the yellow loaf. "She's a thriftless, no-account housekeeper, and I'll tell her so to-morrow."

        Still holding the knife in his clinched fist, he sat munching the cake with a relish which brought a smile to Maria's tired eyes.

        "Yes, I've a powerful sweet tooth myself," he added as he cut another slice.

CHAPTER VII
WILL FACES DESPERATION AND STANDS AT BAY

        Leaving Molly still asleep, Will dressed himself hurriedly, and, putting the diamond brooch in his pocket, ran out to where Christopher was standing midway of the bare field.

        "So you're doing my work again," he said, not ungratefully.

        "If I didn't I'd like to know who would," responded Christopher with rough kindliness, as he dropped a wilted plant into a hole. "You're up early this morning. Where are you off to?"

        Will drew the brooch from his pocket and held it up with a laugh.

        "Maria gave me this," he explained, "and I'm going to town to turn it into money."

        "Well, I'll keep an eye on the place while you

are away," returned Christopher, without looking at the trinket. "Go about your business, and for heaven's sake don't stop to drink. Some men can stand liquor: you can't. It makes a beast of you."

        "And not of you, eh?"

        "It never gets the chance. I know when to stop. That's the difference between us."

        "Of course that's the difference," rejoined Will a little doggedly. "I never know when to stop about anything, I'll be hanged if I do. It's my cursed luck to go at a headlong gait."

        "And some day you'll get your neck broken. Well, be off now, or you'll most likely miss the stage."

        He turned away to sort the young plants in his basket, while Will started at a brisk pace for the cross-roads.

        The planting was tedious work, and it was almost evening before Christopher reached the end of the field and started home along the little winding lane. He had eaten a scant dinner with Molly, who had worried him by tearful complaints across the turnip salad. She had never looked prettier than in her thin white blouse, with her disordered curls shadowing her blue eyes, and he had never found her more frankly selfish. Her shallow-rooted nature awakened in him a feeling that was akin to repulsion, and he saw in imagination the gallant resolution with which Maria would have battled against such sordid miseries. At the first touch of her heroic spirit they would have been sordid no longer, for into the most squalid suffering her golden nature would have shed something of its sunshine. Beauty would have surrounded her

in Will's cabin as surely as in Blake Hall. And with the thought there came to him the knowledge, wrung from experience, that there are souls which do not yield to events, but bend and shape them into the likeness of themselves. No favouring circumstance could have evolved Maria out of Molly, nor could any crushing one have formed Molly from Maria's substance. The two women were as far asunder as the poles, united only by a certain softness of sex he found in them both.

        The sun had dropped behind the pines and a gray mist was floating slowly across the level landscape. The fields were still in daylight, while dusk already enshrouded the leafy road, and it was from out the gloom that obscured the first short bend that he saw presently emerge the figure of a man who appeared to walk unsteadily and with an effort.

        For an instant Christopher stopped short in the lane; then he went forward at a single impetuous stride.

        "Will!" he cried in a voice of thunder.

        Will looked up with dazed eyes, and, seeing who had called him, burst into a loud and boisterous laugh.

        "So you'll begin with your darn preaching," he remarked, gaping.

        For reply, Christopher reached out, and, seizing him by the shoulder, shook him roughly to his senses.

        "What's the meaning of this tomfoolery?" he demanded. "Do you mean to say you've made a beast of yourself, after all?"

        Partly sobered by the shock, Will gazed back at

him with a dogged misery which gave his face the colour of extreme old age.

        "I'm not so drunk as I look," he responded bitterly. "I wish to heaven I were! There are worse things than being drunk, though you won't believe it. I say," he added, in a sudden, hysterical exclamation, "you're the only friend I have on earth!"

        "Nonsense. What have you been doing?"

        "Oh, I couldn't help it - it wasn't my fault, I'll be blamed if it was! I did sell the breastpin and get the money, and wrapped it in the list of things that Molly wanted. I put them in my pocket," he finished, touching his coat, "the money and the list together."

        "And where is it?"

        For a moment Will did not reply, but stood shaking like a blade of grass in a high wind. Then removing his hat, he mopped feebly at the beads of sweat upon his forehead. His eyes had the dumb appeal of a frightened animal's. "I haven't had a morsel all day," he whimpered, "and the effect of the whisky has all worn off."

        "Speak up, man," said Christopher kindly. "I can't eat you."

        "Oh, it's not you," returned Will desperately; "it's Molly. I'm afraid to go home and look Molly in the face."

        "Pish! She doesn't bite."

        "She does worse; she cries."

        "Then, for God's sake, out with the trouble," urged Christopher, losing patience. "You've lost the money, I take it; but how?"

        "There was a fair," groaned Will, his voice breaking.

"I met Fred Turner and a strange man who owned horses, and they asked me to come and watch the racing. Then we had drinks and began to bet, and somehow I always lost after the first time. Before I knew it the money was all gone, every single cent, and I owed Fred Turner a hundred and fifty dollars."

        Christopher's gaze travelled slowly up and down the slight figure before him and he swore softly beneath his breath.

        "Well, you have made a mess of it!" he exclaimed with a laugh.

        "I knew you'd say so, and you're the only friend I have on earth. As for Molly - oh, I'm afraid to go home, that's all. Do you know, I've half a mind to run away for good?"

        "Pshaw! Accidents will happen, and there's nothing in all this to take the pluck out of a man. I've been through worse things myself."

        "But Fred Turner!" groaned Will. "I promised him I'd pay him in two days."

        "Then you'll do it. I'll undertake to see to that."

        "You!" exclaimed the other, with so abject a reliance upon the spoken word that it brought a laugh from Christopher's lips. "How will you manage it ?"

        "Oh, somehow - mortgage the farm, I reckon. At any rate, in two days you shall be clear of your debt to Fred Turner; there's my word. All I hope is that you'll learn a lesson from the fright."

        "Oh, I will, I will; and by Jove! you are a bully chap!"

        "Then go home and make your peace with Molly.

Mind you, if you get in liquor again I warn you I won't lift a hand."

        With a last cheery "good night" he swung on along the road, dismissing the thought of Will to invoke that of Maria, and meeting again in fancy the rich promise of her upturned lips. Body and soul she was his now, flame and clay, true brain and true heart. "I will follow you, for the lifting of a finger, anywhere," she had said, and the words reeled madly in his thoughts. Her impassioned look returned to him, and he closed his eyes as a man does in the face of an emotion which proclaims him craven.

        When Christopher's footsteps had faded in the distance, Will, who had been looking wistfully after him, shook together his dissolving courage and started with a strengthened purpose to bear the bad news to Molly. A light streamed through the broken shutters of her window, and when he laid his hand upon the door it shot open and she stood before him.

        "So you're back at last," she said sharply; "and late again."

        "I couldn't help it," he answered with assumed indifference, entering and passing quickly under the fire of her questioning look. "I was kept."

        "What kept you?"

        "Oh, business." "I'd like to know what business you have!" she retorted querulously; and a minute later: "Have you brought the medicine?"

        He went over to the table and stood looking gloomily down upon the scattered remains of supper

- upon the sloppy oilcloth, the cracked earthen-ware tea-pot, and the plate half filled with sobby bread. "Give me something to eat. I'm almost starved," he pleaded.

        A flash shot from her blue eyes, while the anger he had feared worked threateningly in the features of her pretty face. There was no temperateness about Molly; she was all storm or sunshine, he had once said in the poetic days of courtship.

        "If you've brought the things, where are they?" she demanded, driving him squarely into a corner from which there was no escape by subterfuge.

        A sullen defiance showed in his aspect, and he turned upon her with a muttered curse. "I haven't them, if you want the truth," he snarled. "I meant to buy them, but Fred Turner got me to drinking and we bet on the races. I lost the money."

        "To Fred Turner!" cried Molly. "Oh, you fool!"

        He made an angry movement toward her; then checking himself, laughed bitterly.

        "You're as bad as grandfather," he said, "and it's like jumping from the frying-pan into the fire. I'll be hanged if I knew you were a shrew when I married you!"

        Molly's eyes fairly blazed, and as she shook her head with an enraged gesture, her hair, tumbling upon her shoulders, flooded her with light. Even in the midst of his fury his ready senses responded to the appeal of her dishevelled loveliness.

        "And I'll be - anything if I knew you were a drunkard!" she retorted, pressing her hand upon her panting breast.

        "Well, you ought to have known it," he sneered,

"for I was one. Christopher Blake could have told you so. But if I remember rightly, you weren't so precious particular at the time. You were glad enough to get anybody, as it happened!"

        "How - how dare you?" wailed Molly, in the helplessness of her rage, and throwing herself upon the lounge, she beat her hands upon the wooden sides and burst into despairing sobs. "Why, oh, why did I marry you?" she moaned between choking gasps.

        " Some said it was because Fred Turner threw you over," returned Will savagely, and having hurled his last envenomed dart, he seized his hat and rushed out into the night.

        The scene had worked like madness on his nerves, and in the darkness of the lane, where the trees kept out the moonbeams, he still saw the flickering lights that he had left behind him in the room. He had eaten nothing all day, and his empty stomach oppressed him with a sensation of nausea. His head spun like a top, and as he walked the road rocked in long seesaws beneath his feet. Yet his one craving was for drink, drink, more drink.

        Running rather than walking, he reached the store at last, and went back to the little smoky room where Tom Spade was drawing beer from the big keg in one corner.

        "Give me something to eat, Tom; I'm starving," he said; "and whisky. I must have whisky or I'll die."

        "It's my belief that you'll die if you do have it," responded Tom. "As for bread and meat, however Susan will give you a bite an' welcome." Nevertheless, he poured out the whisky, and, leaving it

upon one of the dirty tables, went hastily out in search of Mrs. Spade.

        Lifting the glass with a shaking hand, Will drained it at a single swallow, feeling his depleted courage revive as the raw spirit burned his throat. A sudden heat invaded him; his eyes saw clearer, and the tips of his fingers were endowed with a new quality of touch. As his hands travelled slowly over his face he became aware that he was looking through his finger ends, and he noted distinctly his haggard features and the short growth of beard which made him appear jaded and unwashed. Then almost instantly the quickness died out of his perception, and he felt the old numbness creeping back.

        "Another glass - I must have another glass," he called out irritably to the empty room. His hands hung stone dead again at his sides, and his head dropped limply forward upon his breast. He had forgotten his quarrel with Molly: he had forgotten everything except his own miserable bodily condition.

        When Susan Spade came in with a plate of bread and ham, he roused himself with a nervous start and inhaled quickly the strong odour of the meat, endeavouring through the sense of smell to reawaken the pang of hunger he had felt earlier in the evening. But in place of the gnawing emptiness there had come now a deadly nausea, and after the first mouthful or two he pushed the food away and called hoarsely for more whisky. His head ached in loud, reverberating throbs, and a queer fancy possessed him that the sound must be as audible to others as to himself. With the thought, he glanced about

suspiciously, but Tom Spade was stopping the keg that he had tapped, and Susan was wiping off the table with energetic sweeps of her checked apron. Relieved by their impassiveness, he braced himself with the determination to drink to the dead-line of unconsciousness and then lie down somewhere in the darkness to sleep off the effects.

        "Whisky - give me more whisky," he repeated angrily.

        But Mrs. Spade, true to her nature, saw fit to intervene between him and destruction.

        "Not another drop, Mr. Will," she said decisively. "Not another drop shall you have in this room if it's the last mortal word I speak. An' if you'd had me by you in the beginning, I'm not afeard to say, things would have helt up a long sight sooner than this."

        "Don't you see I'm in downright agony?" groaned Will, rapping the glass upon the table. "My head is splitting, I tell you, and I must have it."

        "Not another drop, suh," replied Mrs. Spade with adamantine firmness of tone. "I ain't a weak woman, thank the Lord, an' as far as that goes, you might split to pieces inside and out right here befo' my eyes an' I wouldn't be a party to sendin' you a step nearer damnation. I ain't afeard of seein' folks suffer. Tom will tell you that."

        "That she ain't, suh," agreed Tom with pride. "If I do say it who shouldn't, thar never was a woman who could stand mo' pain in other people than can Susan. Mo' than that, Mr. Will, she's right, though I'd be sayin' so even if she wasn't - seein' that the only rule for makin' a woman think yo' way is always

to think hers. But she's right, and that's the truth. You've had too much."

        "Oh, you're driving me mad between you!" cried Will in desperation. "I'm in awful trouble, and there's nothing under heaven will make me forget it except drink. One glass more - just one. That can't hurt me."

        "May he have one glass, Susan?" asked Tom, appealing to his wife.

        "Not another drop, suh," returned Mrs. Spade, immovable as a rock.

        "Not another drop, she says," repeated the big storekeeper in a sinking voice. Then he laid his hand sympathetically on Will's shoulder. "To be sure, I know you're in trouble," he said, "an' I'll swear it's an out-an'-out shame, I don't care who hears me. Yes, I'll stand to it in the very face of Bill Fletcher himself."

        "Oh, he's a devil!" cried Will, stung by the name he hated.

        "I ain't sayin' you've been all you should have been," pursued Tom in his friendly tones, "but as I told Susan yestiddy, a body can't sow wild oats in one generation without havin' a volunteer crop spring up in the next. Now, yo' wild oats were sown long befo' you were born. Ain't that so, Susan?"

        Mrs. Spade planted her hands squarely upon her hips and stood her ground with a solidity which was as impressive in its way as dignity.

        "I've spoken my mind to Bill Fletcher," she said, "an' I'll speak it again. 'How's that boy goin' to live, suh?' That's what I asked, an' 'twas after he told me to shut my mouth, that it was. Right or

wrong, that's what I told him. You've gone an' made the meanest will this county has ever seen."

        "What?" cried Will, springing to his feet, while the room whirled round him.

        "Thar, thar, Susan, you've talked too much," interposed Tom, a little frightened. "What she means is just some foolishness yo' grandpa's been lettin' out," he added; "but he'll live long enough yet to change his mind an' his will, too."

        "What is it about? Speak louder, will you? My ears buzz so I can't hear thunder."

        Tom coughed reproachfully at Susan.

        "Well, he was talkin' down here last night about havin' changed his will," he said apologetically. "He's tied it up, it seems, so you can't get it, an' he's gone an' left the bulk of it to Mrs. Wyndham."

        "To Maria!" repeated Will, and saw scarlet.

        "That's what he says; but he'll last to change his mind yet, never fear. Anger doesn't live as long as a man - eh, Susan?"

        But Will had risen and was walking quite steadily toward the door. His face was dead white, and there were deep blue circles about his eyes, which sparkled brilliantly. When he turned for a moment before going out, he sucked in his under lip with a hissing sound.

        "So this was Maria's trick all along," he said hoarsely.

CHAPTER VIII
HOW CHRISTOPHER COMES INTO HIS REVENGE

        Yes, it was all plain now - as clear as day. He saw one by one each devilish move that she had made, and he meant to pay her back for all before the night was over. He would tell her what he thought of her, freely, fully, in words that she would never forget. The names that he would use, the curses he would

utter, spun deliriously in his head, and as he went on he found himself speaking his phrases aloud to the darkness, trying upon the silence the effect of each blighting sentence.

        The lights of the Hall twinkled presently among the trees, and, crossing the lawn, he crept into the little area under the back steps. If Maria was not in the kitchen, the servant would be, he argued, and he would send up a peremptory summons which would bring her down upon the instant. It was not late enough for her to be in bed, at least, and he chuckled over the thought of the sleepless night which she would spend.

        Pushing back the door cautiously on its old, rusty hinges, he entered on tip-toe and glanced suspiciously around. The room was empty, but a lamp with a smoked chimney burned upon the table, and there were the glimmering embers of a wood fire in the stove. It was just as he had left it the evening before, and this aroused in him a feeling of surprise, so long a stretch appeared to cover the last twenty-four hours. The same basket of chicken feathers was in the sagging split-bottomed chair, the same pile of black walnuts lay on the hearth, and the rusted hammer was still lying where he had dropped it upon the bricks. Even the smell was the same - a mixture of baked bread and burned feathers.

        Going to the door that led into the house, he opened it and looked up the dark staircase; then a sound reached him from the dining-room, and with a nervous shiver he turned away and came back to the stove. A dread paralysed him lest the meeting with Maria should be delayed until his courage oozed

out of him, and to nerve himself for the encounter he summoned to mind all the evidence, which gathered in a cloud of witnesses, to prove her treachery. Once it occurred to him that after a few minutes of waiting he might tighten the screw upon his nerves and so pluck up the audacity, if not the resolution, to ascend the stair boldly and denounce her in the presence of his grandfather. But the memory of Fletcher's face wagged before him, and, quaking with terror, he huddled with open palms above the stove. Then, pacing slowly up and down the room, he set to work frantically to lash himself into the drunken bravado which he miscalled courage.

        Of a sudden his hunger assailed him, violent, convulsive, and, going over to the tin safe, he rummaged among the cold scraps he found there, devouring greedily the food which had been set by for the hounds. A bottle of Miss Saidie's raspberry vinegar was hidden in one corner, and he tore the paper label from the cork and drank like a man who perishes from thirst. His energy, which had evaporated from fatigue and hunger, surged back in spasms of anger, and as he turned away, invigorated, from the safe, he realised as he had never done before the full measure of his rage against Maria. At the moment, had she come in upon him, he felt that he could have struck her in the face.

        But she did not come, and the slow minutes fretted him in their passage. A flame shot up in the stove, and, catching a knot of resinous pine, burned steadily, licking patiently about the fading embers. The air became charged again with the odour of burned feathers, and he saw that a handful, with the dried

blood of the fowl still adhering to them, had been scattered upon the ashes. As he idly noted the colours of red and black, he remembered with bitterness that he had raised game-cocks once when he was a boy at the Hall, and that Maria had smashed a nestful of his eggs in a fit of passion. The incident swelled to enormous proportions in his thoughts, and he determined that he would remind her of it in the interview that was before them.

        The door into the house creaked suddenly behind him; he wheeled about nervously, and then stood with hanging jaws staring into the face of Fletcher.

        "So it is you, is it?" said the old man, raising the stick he carried. "So it is you, as I suspected - you darn rascal!"

        But the power of speech had departed from Will in the presence that he dreaded, and he stood clutching tightly to his harvest hat, and shaking his head as if to deny the obvious fact of his own identity.

        "I thought it was you," pursued Fletcher, licking his dry lips. "I heard a noise, and I picked up my stick, thinking it was you. I'll have no thieving beggars on my place, I tell you, so the quicker you git off the better. When were you here last, I'd like to know?"

        "Yesterday," answered Will, speaking the truth from sheer physical inability to frame a lie. "I came to see Maria. She's cheated me - she's cheated me all along."

        "Then she lied," said Fletcher softly. "Then she lied and I didn't know it."

        "She's cheated me," insisted Will hoarsely. "It's been all a scheme of hers from the very beginning.

She's cheated me about the will, grandpa; I swear she has."

        "Eh? What's that?" responded the old man, shaking back his heavy eyebrows. "Say your say right now, for in five minutes you go off this place with every hound in the pack yelping at your heels. I'll not have you here - I'll not have you here!"

        The words ended in a snarl, and a fleck of foam dropped on his gray beard.

        "But it was all Maria's doing," urged Will passionately. "She has been against me from the first: I see that now. She's plotted to oust me from the very start."

        "Well, she might have spared herself the trouble," was Fletcher's sharp rejoinder.

        "Let me explain - let me explain," pleaded the other, in a desperate effort to gain time; "just a word or two - I only want a word."

        But when his grandfather drew back and stood glowering upon him in silence, the speech he had wished to utter withered upon his lips, blighted by a panic terror, and he stood mumbling incoherently beneath his breath.

        "Give me a word - a word is all I want," he reiterated wildly.

        "Then out with your damned word and begone!" roared Fletcher.

        Will's eyes travelled helplessly around the room, seeking in vain some inspiration from the objects his gaze encountered. The tin safe, the basket of feathers, the pile of walnuts off the hearth, each arrested his wandering attention for an instant, and he beheld all the details with amazing vividness.

A mouse came out into the room, gliding like a shadow along the wall to the pile of walnuts, and his eyes followed it as if drawn by an invisible thread.

        "It's Maria - it's all Maria," he stuttered, and could think of nothing further. His brain seemed suddenly paralysed, and he found himself tugging hopelessly at the most commonplace word which would not come. All his swaggering bravado had scampered off at the first wag of the old man's head.

        "If that's what you've got to say, you might as well begone," returned Fletcher, moving toward him. "I warn you now that the next time I find you here you won't git off so easy. Maria or no Maria, you ain't goin' to lounge about this place so long as my name is Bill Fletcher. The farther you keep yourself and your yaller-headed huzzy out of my sight the better. Thar, now, be off or you'll git a licking."

        "But I tell you Maria's cheated me - she's cheated me," returned Will, his voice rising shrilly as he was goaded into revolt. "She's been scheming to get the place all along; that's her trick."

        "Pish! Tush!" responded Fletcher. "Are you going or are you not?"

        Will's eyes burned like coals, and an observer, noting the two men as they stood glaring at each other, would have been struck by their resemblance in attitude and expression rather than in feature. Both leaned slightly forward, with their chins thrust out and their jaws dropped, and there was a ceaseless twitching of the small muscles in both faces. The beast in each had sprung violently to the surface and recognised the likeness at which he snarled.

        "You've left me to starve!" cried Will, strangling

a sob of anger. "It's not fair! You have no right. The money ought to be mine - I swear it ought!"

        "Oh, it ought, ought it?" sneered the old man, with an ugly laugh.

        At the sound of the laugh, Will shrank back and shivered as if from the stroke of a whip. The spirit of rage worked in his blood like the spirit of drink, and he felt his disordered nerves respond in a sudden frenzy.

        "It ought to be mine, you devil, and you know it!" he cried.

        "I do, do I?" retorted Fletcher, still cackling. "Well, jest grin at me a minute longer like that brazen wench your mother and I'll lay my stick across your shoulders for good and all. As for my money, it's mine, I reckon, and, living or dead, I'll look to it that not one red cent gits to you. Blast you! Stop your grinning!"

        He raised the stick and made a long swerve sideways, but the other, picking up the hammer from the hearth, jerked it above his head and stood braced for the assault. In the silence of the room Will heard the thumping of his own heart, and the sound inspired him like the drums of battle. He was in a quiver from head to foot, but it was a quiver of rage, not of fear, and a glow of pride possessed him that he could lift his eyes and look Fletcher squarely in the face.

        "You're a devil - a devil! a devil!" he cried shrilly, sticking out his tongue like a pert and vulgar little boy. "Christopher Blake was right - you're a devil!"

        As the name struck him between the eyes the

old man lurched back against the stove; then recovering himself, he made a swift movement forward and brought his stick down with all his force on the boy's shoulder.

        "Take that, you lying varmint!" he shouted, choking.

        The next instant his weapon had dropped from his hand, and he reached out blindly, grappling with the air, for Will had turned upon him with the spring of a wild beast and sent the hammer crushing into his temple.

        There was a muffled thud, and Fletcher went down in a hudded heap upon the floor, while the other stood over him in the weakness which had succeeded his drunken frenzy.

        "I told you to let me alone. I told you I'd do it," said Will doggedly, and a moment later: "I told you I'd do it."

        The hammer was still in his hand, and, lifting it, he examined it with a morbid curiosity. A red fleck stained the iron, and glancing down he saw that there was a splotch of blood on Fletcher's temple. "I told him I'd do it," he repeated, speaking this time to himself.

        Then instantly the silence in the room stopped his heart-beats and set him quaking in a superstitious terror through every fiber. He heard the stir of the mouse in the pile of walnuts, the hissing of the flame above the embers, and the sudden breaking of the smoked chimney of the lamp. Then as he leaned down he heard something else - the steady ticking of the big silver watch in Fletcher's pocket.

        A horror of great darkness fell over him, and, turning, he reeled like a drunken man out into the night.

CHAPTER IX
THE FULFILLING OF THE LAW

        "Come in quietly," he said. "Uncle Tucker is asleep upstairs. What in thunder is the trouble now?"

        Stepping back, he led the way into what so short a time ago had been Mrs. Blake's parlour, and then pausing in the center of the floor, stood waiting with knitted brows for an explanation of the visit. But Will, who had shrunk dazzled from the flash of the lamp, now lingered to put up the bar with shaking hands.

        "For God's sake, what is it?" questioned Christopher, and a start shook through him at sight of the other's face. "Have you had a fit?"

        Closing the parlour door behind him, Will crossed the room and caught at the mantel for support. "I told you I'd do it some day - I told you I'd do it," he said incoherently, in a frantic effort to shift the burden of responsibility upon stronger shoulders.

"You might have known all along that I'd do it some day."

        "Do what?" demanded Christopher, while he felt the current of his blood grow weak. "Out with it, now. Speak up. You're as white as a sheet."

        "He struck me - he struck me first. The bruise is here," resumed Will, in the same eager attempt at self-justification. "Then I hit him on the head with a hammer and his skull gave way. I didn't hit hard. I swear it was a little blow; but he's dead. I left him stone dead in the kitchen."

        "My God, man!" exclaimed Christopher, and touched him on the shoulder.

        With a groan, Will put up his hands and covered his bloodshot eyes. "I didn't mean to do it - I swear I didn't," he protested. "Who'd have thought his head would crush in like that at the first little blow - just a tap with an old hammer? Why, it would hardly have cracked a walnut! And what was the hammer doing there, anyway? They have no business to leave such things lying about on the hearth. It was all their fault - they ought to have put the hammer away."

        A convulsive shudder ran through him, ending in his hands and feet, which jerked wildly. His face was gray and old - so old that he might have been taken, at the first glance, for a man of eighty, and in the intervals between his words he sucked in his breath with a hissing noise. Meeting Christopher's look, he broke into a spasm of frightened sobs, whimpering like a child that has been whipped.

        "I told you not to drink again," said Christopher

sharply as he struggled to collect his thoughts. "I told you liquor would make a beast of you."

        "I'll never touch another drop. I swear I'll never touch another drop," groaned Will, still sobbing. "I didn't mean to kill him, I tell you. It wasn't as if I really meant to kill him; you see that. It was all the fault of that accursed hammer they left lying on the hearth. A man must have a lot of courage to murder anybody, mustn't he?" he added, with a feeble smile; "and I'm a coward - you know I've always been a coward; haven't I - haven't I?" he persisted, and Christopher nodded an agreement.

        "You see, I wasn't to blame, after all; but he flew into such a rage - he always flew into a rage when he heard your name."

        "So you brought my name in?" asked Christopher carelessly.

        "Oh, it was that that did it; it was your name," replied Will breathlessly. "I told him you said he was a devil - you did say so, you know. 'Christopher Blake was right; he called you a devil,' that was it. Then he ran at me with his stick, and I jerked up the hammer, and - Oh, my God, they mustn't hang me!"

        "Nonsense!" retorted Christopher roughly, for the other had dropped upon the floor and was grovelling in drunken hysterics at his feet. "It makes me sick to see a man act like an ass."

        "Get me out of this and I'll never touch a drop," moaned Will. "Take me away from here - hide me anywhere. I'll go anywhere, I'll promise anything, only they mustn't find me. If they find me I'll go mad - I'll go mad in gaol."

        "Shut up!" rejoined Christopher, listening with irritation to the sound of the other's hissing breath. "Stop your infernal racket a minute and let me think. Here, get up. Are you too drunk to stand on your feet?"

        "I'm sober - I'm perfectly sober," protested Will, and, rising obediently, he stood clutching at the chimney-piece. "Get me out of this - only get me out of this," he repeated, with a desperate reliance on the other's power to avert the consequences of his deed. "I've always been a good friend to you," he went on passionately. "The quarrel first started about you, and I stood up for you to the last. I never let him say anything against you - I never did!"

        "I'm much obliged to you," returned Christopher, and felt that he might as well have wasted his irony on a beaten hound. Turning away from the wild entreaty of Will's eyes, he walked slowly up and down the room, taking care to step lightly lest the boards should creak and awaken Tucker.

        The parlour was just as Mrs. Blake had left it: her high-backed Elizabethan chair, filled with cushions, stood on the hearth; the dried grasses in the two tall vases shed their ashy pollen down upon the bricks. Even the yellow cat, grown old and sluggish, dozed in her favourite spot beside the embroidered ottoman.

        On the whitewashed walls the old Blake portraits still presided, and he found, for the first time, an artless humour in the formality of the ancestral attitude - in the splendid pose which they had handed down like an heirloom through the centuries. Among

them he saw the comely, high-coloured features of that gallant cynic, Bolivar, the man who had stamped his beauty upon three generations, and his gaze lingered with a gentle ridicule on the blithe candour in the eyes and the characteristic touch of brutality about the mouth. Then he passed to his father, portly, impressive, a high liver, a generous young blood, and then to the classic Saint-Memin profile of Aunt Susannah, limned delicately against a background of faded pink. And from her he went on to his mother's portrait, painted in shimmering brocade under rose-garlands held by smiling Loves.

        He looked at them all steadily for a while, seeking from the changeless lips of each an answer to the question which he felt knocking at his own heart. In every limb, in every feature, in every fiber he was plainly born to be one of themselves, and yet from their elegant remoteness they stared down upon the rustic labourer who was their descendant. Degraded, coarsened, disinherited, the last Blake stood before them, with his poverty and ignorance illumined only at long intervals by the flame of a soul which, though darkened, was still unquenched.

        The night dragged slowly on, while he paced the floor with his thoughts and Will moaned and tossed, a shivering heap, upon the sofa.

        "Stop your everlasting cackle!" Christopher had once shouted angrily, forgetting Tucker, and for the space of a few minutes the other had lain silent, choking back the strangling sobs. But presently the shattered nerves revolted against restraint, and Will burst out afresh into wild crying. The yellow cat, grown suddenly restless, crossed the room and

jumped upon the sofa, where she stood clawing at the cover, and he clung to her with a pathetic recognition of dumb sympathy - the sympathy which he could not wring from the careless indifference of Christopher's look.

        "Speak to me - say something," he pleaded at last, stretching out his hands. "If this keeps up I'll go mad before morning."

        At this Christopher came toward him, and, stopping in his walk, frowned down upon the sofa.

        "You deserve everything you'd get," he said angrily. "You're as big a fool as ever trod this earth, and there's no reason under heaven why I should lift my hand to help you. There's no reason - there's no reason," he repeated in furious tones.

        "But you'll do it - you'll get me out of it!" cried Will, grasping the other's knees.

        "And two weeks later you'd be in another scrape."

        "Not a single drop - I'll never touch a drop again. Before God I swear it!"

        "Pshaw! I've heard that oath before."

        Strangling a scream, Will caught him by the arm, dragging himself slowly into a sitting posture. "I'll hang myself if you let them get me," he urged hysterically. "I'll hang myself in gaol rather than let them do it. I can't face it all - I can't - I can't. It isn't grandpa I mind; I'm not afraid of him. He was a devil. But it's the rest - the rest."

        Roughly shaking him off, Christopher left him huddled upon the floor and resumed his steady walk up and down the room. In his ears the incoherent phrases grew presently fainter, and after a time he lost entirely their frenzied drift. "A little

blow - just a little blow," ended finally in muffled sounds of weeping.

        The habit of outward composure which always came to him in moments of swift experience possessed him so perfectly now that Will, lifting miserable eyes to his face, lowered them, appalled by its unfeeling gravity.

        "I've been a good friend to you - a deuced good friend to you," urged the younger man in a last passionate appeal for the aid whose direction he had not yet defined.

        "What is this thought which I cannot get rid of?" asked Christopher moodily of himself. "And what business is it of mine, anyway? What am I to the boy or the boy to me?" But even with the words he remembered the morning more than five years ago when he had gone out to the gate with his bird gun on his shoulder and found Will Fletcher and the spotted foxhound puppies awaiting him in the road. He saw again the boy's face, with the sunlight full upon it - eager, alert, a little petulant, full of good impulses readily turned adrift. There had been no evil upon it then - only weakness and a pathetic absence of determination. His own damnable intention was thrust back upon him, and he heard again the words of Carraway which had reechoed in his thoughts. "The way to touch the man, then, is through the boy." So it was the way, after all! He almost laughed aloud at his prophetic insight. He had touched the man vitally enough at last, and it was through the boy. He had murdered Bill Fletcher, and he had done it through the only thing Bill Fletcher had ever loved. From this he returned

again to the memory of the deliberate purpose of that day - to the ribald jests, the coarse profanities the brutal oaths. Then to the night when he had forced the first drink down Will's throat, and so on through the five years of his revenge to the present moment. Well, his triumph had come at last the summit was put upon his life's work, and he was - he must be - content.

        Will raised his head and looked at him in reviving hope.

        "You're the only friend I have on earth," he muttered between his teeth.

        The first streak of dawn entered suddenly flooding the room with a thin gray light in which the familiar objects appeared robbed of all atmospheric values. With a last feeble flicker the lamp shot up and went out, and the ashen wash of daybreak seemed the fit medium for the crude ugliness of life.

        Towering almost grotesquely in the pallid dawn, Christopher came and leaned above the sofa to which Will had dragged himself again.

        "You must get out of this," he said, "and quickly, for we've wasted the whole night wrangling. Have you any money?"

        Will fumbled in his pocket and brought out a few cents, which he held in his open palm, while the other unlocked the drawer of the old secretary and handed him a roll of banknotes.

        "Take this and buy a ticket somewhere. It's the money I scraped up to pay Fred Turner."

        "To pay Fred Turner?" echoed Will, as if in that lay the significance of the remark.

        "Take it and buy a ticket, and when you get where

you're going, sit still and keep your mouth shut. If you wear a bold face you will go scot-free; remember that; but everything depends upon your keeping a stiff front. And now go - through the back door and past the kitchen to the piece of woods beyond the pasture. Cut through them to Tanner's Station and take the train there, mind, for the North."

        With a short laugh he held out his big, knotted hand.

        "Good-by," he said, "and don't be a damned fool."

        "Good-by," answered Will, clinging desperately to his outstretched arm. Then an ashen pallor overspread his face, and he slunk nervously toward the kitchen, for there was the sound of footsteps on the little porch outside, followed by a brisk rap on the front door.

        "Go!" whispered Christopher, hardly taking breath, and he stood waiting while Will ran along the wooden platform and past the stable toward the pasture.

        The rap came again, and he turned quickly. "Quit your racket and let me get on my clothes!" he shouted, and hesitated a little longer.

        As he stood alone there in the center of the room, his eyes, traversing the walls, fell on the portrait of Bolivar Blake, and with one of the fantastic tricks of memory there shot into his head the dying phrase of that gay sinner: "I may not sit with the saints, but I shall stand among the gentlemen."

        "Precious old ass!" he muttered, and unbarred the door.

        As he flung it open the first rays of sunlight splashed across the threshold, and he was conscious, all at

once, of a strange exhilaration, as if he were breasting one of the big waves of life.

        "This is a pretty way to wake up a fellow who has been planting tobacco till he's stiff," he grumbled. "Is that you Tom?" He glanced carelessly round, nodding with a kind of friendly condescension to each man of the little group. "How are you, Matthew? Hello, Fred!"

        Tom drew back, coughing, and scraped the heel of his boot on the topmost step.

        "We didn't mean to git you out of bed, Mr. Christopher,?" he explained apologetically, "but the truth is we want Will Fletcher an' he ain't at home. The old man's murdered, suh."

        "Murdered, is he?" exclaimed Christopher, with a long whistle, "and you want Will Fletcher - which shows what a very pretty sheriff you would make. Well, if you're so strong on his scent that you can't turn aside, most likely you'll find him sleeping off his drunk under my haystack. But if you're looking for the man who killed Bill Fletcher, then that's a different matter," he added, taking down his hat, "and I reckon, boys, I'm about ready to come along."

CHAPTER X
THE WHEEL OF LIFE

        It was this attitude, people said presently, rather than the murder of Bill Fletcher, which brought him the sentence he heard with so insolent an indifference.

        "Five years wasn't much for killin' a man, maybe," Tom Spade observed, "but it was a good deal, when you come to think of it, for a Blake to pay jest for gettin' even with a Fletcher. Why, he might have brained Bill Fletcher an' welcome," the storekeeper added a little wistfully, "if only he hadn't put on such a nasty manner afterward."

        But it was behind this impregnable reserve that

Christopher retreated as into a walled fortress. There had been no sentiment in his act, he told himself; he had not even felt the romantic fervour of the sacrifice. A certain staunch justice was all he saw in it, relieved doubtless by a share of his hereditary love of desperate hopes - of the hot-headed clinging to that last shifting foothold on which a man might still make his fight against the power of circumstance. And so, with that strange mixture of rustic crudeness and aristocratic arrogance, he turned his face from his friends and went stubbornly through the cross-questioning of the court.

        From first to last he had not wavered in his refusal to see Maria, and there had been an angry vehemence in the resistance he had made to her passionate entreaty for a meeting. When by the early autumn he went from the little town gaol to serve his five years in the State prison, his most vivid memory of her was as she looked with the moonlight on her face in the open field. As the months went on, this gradually grew remote and dim in his remembrance, like a bright star over which the clouds thicken, and his thoughts declined, almost without an upward inspiration, upon the brutal level of his daily life. Mere physical disgust was his first violent recoil from what had seemed a curious deadness of his whole nature, and the awakening of the senses preceded by many months the final resurrection of the more spiritual emotions. The sources of health were still abundant in him, he admitted, if the vile air, the fetid smells, the closeness as of huddled animals, the filth, the obscenity, the insufferable bestial humanity could arouse in him a bodily nausea so nearly

resembling disease. There were moments when he felt capable of any crime from sheer frenzied loathing of his surroundings - when for the sake of the clean space of the tobacco fields and the pure water of the little spring he would have murdered Bill Fletcher a dozen times. As for the old man's death in itself, it had never caused him so much as a quiver of the conscience. Bill Fletcher deserved to die, and the world was well rid of him - that was all.

        But his own misery! This was with him always, and there was no escape from the moral wretchedness which seemed to follow so closely upon crime. Fresh from the open country and the keen winds that blow over level spaces, he seemed mentally and physically to wither in the change of air - to shrink slowly to the perishing root, like a plant that has been brought from a rich meadow to the aridity of the close-packed city. And with the growing of this strange form of homesickness he would be driven, at times, into an almost delirious cruelty toward those who were weaker than himself, for there were summer nights when he would brutally knock smaller men from the single window of the cell and cling, panting for breath, to the iron bars. As the year went on, his grim silence, too, became for those around him as the inevitable shadow of the prison, and he went about his daily work in a churlish loneliness which caused even the convicts among whom he lived to shrink back from his presence.

        Then with the closing of the second winter his superb physical strength snapped suddenly like a cord that has stood too tight a strain, and for weeks he lingered between life and death in the hospital,

into which he was carried while yet unconscious. With his returning health, when the abatement of the fever left him strangely shaken and the unearthly pallor still clung to his face and hands, he awoke for the first time to a knowledge that his illness had altered - for the period of his convalescence, at least - the vision through which he had grown to regard the world.

        A change had come to him, in that mysterious borderland so near the grave, and the bare places in his soul had burst suddenly into fulfilment. Sitting one Sunday morning in the open court of the prison, with his thin white hands hanging between his knees and his head, cropped now of its thick, fair hair, raised to the sunshine, it seemed to him that, like Tucker on the old bench, he had learned at last how to be happy. The warm sun in his face, the blue sky straight overhead, the spouting fountain from which a sparrow drank, produced in him a recognition, wholly passionless, of the abundant physical beauty of the earth - of a beauty in the blue sky and in the clear sunshine falling upon the prison court.

        A month ago he had wondered almost hopefully if his was to be one of those pathetic sunken graves, marked for so brief a time by wooden headboards - the graves of the men who had died within the walls - and now there pulsed through him, sitting there alone, a quiet satisfaction in the thought that he might still breathe the air and look into men's faces and see the blue sky overhead. The sky in itself! That was enough to fill one's memory to overflowing, Tucker had said.

        A tall, lean convict, newly released from the

hospital, crossed the court at a stumbling pace and stood for a moment at his side.

        "I reckon you're hankerin'," he remarked. "I was sent down here from the mountains, an' I hanker terrible for the sight of the old Humpback Knob."

        "And I'd like to see a level sweep - hardly a hill, just a clean stretch for the wind to blow over the tobacco."

        "You're from the tobaccy belt, then, ain't you? What are you here for?"

        "Killing a man. And you?"

        "Killin' two."

        He limped off at his feeble step, and Christopher rubbed his hands in the warm sunshine and wondered how it would feel to bask on one of the old logs by the roadside.

        That afternoon Jim Weatherby came to see him, bringing the news that Lila's baby had come and that she had named it Christopher. "It's the living image of you, she says," he added, smiling; "but I confess I can't quite see it. The funny part is, you know, that Cynthia is just as crazy about it as Lila is, and she looks ten years younger since the little chap came."

        "And Uncle Tucker?"

        "His old wounds trouble him, but he sent you word he was waiting to go till you came back again."

        A blur swam before Christopher's eyes, and he saw in fancy the old soldier waiting for him on the bench beside the damask rose-bush.

        "And the others - and Maria Wyndham?" he asked, swallowing the lump in his throat.

        Jim reached out and laid his hand on the broad stripes across the other's shoulder.

        "She was with Mr. Tucker when he said that," he replied; "they are always together now; and she added: Tell him we shall wait together till he comes."

        The tears which had blinded Christopher's eyes fell down upon his clasped hands.

        "My God! Let me live to go back!" he cried out in his weakness.

        From this time the element of hope entered into his life, and like its shadow there came the brooding fear that he should not live to see the year of his release. With his declining health he had been given lighter work in the prison factory, but the small tasks seemed to him heavier than the large ones he remembered. There was no disease, the physician in the hospital assured him: it was only his unusual form of homesickness feeding upon his weakened frame. Let him return once more to the outdoor life and the fresh air of the tobacco fields and within six months his old physical hardihood would revive.

        It was noticeable at this time that the quiet tolerance which had grown upon him in his convalescence drew to him the sympathy which he had at first repulsed. The interest awakened in the beginning by some rare force of attraction in his mere bodily presence became now, when he had fallen away to what seemed the shadow of himself, a friendly and almost affectionate curiosity concerning his earlier history. With this there grew slowly a rough companionship between him and the men among whom he lived, and he found presently to his surprise that there was hardly one of them but

had some soft spot in his character - some particular virtue which was still alive. The knowledge of good and evil thrust upon him in these months was not without effect in developing a certain largeness of outlook upon humanity - a kind of generous philosophy which remained with him afterward in the form of a peculiar mellowness of temperament.

        The autumn of his third year was already closing when, being sent for one morning from the office of the superintendent, he went in to find Cynthia awaiting him with his pardon in her hand. "I've come for you, Christopher," she said, weeping at sight of his wasted figure. "The whole county has been working to get you out, and you are free at last."

        "Free at last?" he repeated mechanically, and was conscious of a disappointment in the fact that he experienced no elation with the words. What was this freedom, that had meant so much to him a month ago?

        "Somebody in Europe wrote back to Maria," she added, while her dry sobs rattled in her bosom, "that the boy had confessed it to a priest who made him write it home. Oh, Christopher! Christopher! I can't understand!"

        "No, you can't understand," returned Christopher, shaking his head. They would not understand, he knew, none of them - neither the world, nor Cynthia, nor his mother who was dead! nor Maria who was living. They would not understand, and even to himself the mystery was still unsolved. He had acted according to the law of his own nature; this was all that was clear to him; and the destiny of

character had controlled him from the beginning. The wheel had turned and he with it, and being as blind as fate itself he could see nothing further.

        Back once more in the familiar country, fresh from the strong grasp of friendly hands, and driving at sunset along the red road beneath half-bared honey-locusts, he was conscious, with a dull throb of regret, that the placid contentment he felt creeping over him failed in emotional resemblance to the happiness he had associated with his return. Had the sap really gone dry within him, and would he go on forever with this curious numbness at his heart?

        "Maria wanted you to go straight to the Hall," said Cynthia, turning suddenly, "but I told her I'd better take you home and put you to bed at once. It was she who went to the Governor and got your pardon," she added after a moment, "but when I begged her to come with me to take it to you she would not do it. She would not see you until you were back in your own place, she said."

        He smiled faintly, and, leaning back among the rugs Cynthia had brought, watched the white mist creeping over the ploughed fields. The thought of Maria no longer stirred his pulses, and when presently they reached the whitewashed cottage, and he sat with Tucker before the wood fire in his mother's parlour, he found himself gazing with a dull impersonal curiosity at the portraits smiling so coldly down upon the hearth. The memory of his mother left him as immovable as did the many trivial associations which thronged through his brain at sight of the room which had been hers. A little later, lying in her tester bed, the fall of the acorns on the

shingled roof above sent him into a profound and untroubled sleep.

        With the first sunlight he awoke, and, noiselessly slipping into his clothes, went out for a daylight view of the country which had dwelt for so long a happy vision in his thoughts. The dew was thick on the grass, and, crossing to the old bench, he sat down in the pale sunshine beside the damask rosebush, on which a single flower blossomed out of season. Beyond the cedars in the graveyard the sunrise flamed golden upon a violet background, and across the field of life-everlasting there ran a sparkling path of fire. The air was strong with autumn scents, and as he drank it in with deep drafts it seemed to him that he began to breathe anew the spirit of life. With a single bound of the heart the sense of freedom came to him, and with it the happiness that he had missed the evening before pulsed through his veins. Much yet remained to him - the earth with its untold miracles, the sky with its infinity of space, his own soul - and Maria!

        With her name he sprang to his feet in the ardour of his impatience, and it was then that, looking up, he saw her coming to him across the sunbeams.