"But it is not possible," she flashed back, lifting her wet blue eyes to his. "How dare you come to me with a tale like this? Oh, I hate you! I shall always hate you! Will you go?"

Before her helpless fury he felt a compassion stronger even than the emotion her tears had aroused.

"It is not fair that I should tell you so much and not tell you all, Milly," he said. "It is not fair that in accusing the man you love, I should still try to shield myself. I know that these things are true because Brown's—Wherry is his name—trial took place immediately before mine—and we saw each other during the terms which we served in prison."

Then before she could move or speak he turned from her and went rapidly from the house and out into the walk.

CHAPTER IX
At The Cross-roads

AT the corner he looked down the street and saw the red flag still swelling in the wind. A man spoke to him; the face was familiar, but he could not recall the name, until after a few congratulatory words about his political prospects, he remembered, with a start, that he was talking to Major Leary.

"You may count on a clean sweep of votes, Mr. Smith—there's no doubt of it," said the Major, beaming with his amiable fiery face.

"There's no doubt of it?" repeated Ordway, while he regarded the enthusiastic politician with a perplexed and troubled look. The Major, the political campaign, the waving red flag and the noisy little town had receded to a blank distance from the moment in which he stood. He wondered vaguely what connection he—Daniel Ordway—had ever held with these things?

Yet his smile was still bright and cheerful as he turned away, with an apologetic word, and passed on into the road to Cedar Hill. The impulse which had driven him breathlessly into Milly's presence had yielded now to the mere dull apathy of indifference, and it mattered to him no longer whether the girl was saved or lost in the end. He thought of her vanity, of her trivial pink and white prettiness with a return of his old irritation. Well, he had done his part—his temperament had ruled him at the decisive instant, and the ensuing consequences of his confession had ceased now to affect or even to interest him. Then, with something like a pang of thought, he remembered that he had with his own hand burned his bridges behind him, and that there was no way out for him except the straight way which led over the body of Daniel Smith. His existence in Tappahannock was now finished; his victory had ended in flight; and there was nothing ahead of him except the new beginning and the old ending. A fresh start and then what? And afterward the few years of quiet again and at the end the expected, the inevitable recurrence of the disgrace which he had begun to recognise as some impersonal natural law that followed upon his footsteps. As the future gradually unrolled itself in his imagination, he felt that his heart sickened in the clutch of the terror that had sprung upon him. Was there to be no end anywhere? Could no place, no name even afford him a permanent shelter? Looking ahead now he saw himself as an old man wandering from refuge to refuge, pursued always by the resurrected corpse of his old life, which though it contained neither his spirit nor his will, still triumphed by the awful semblance it bore his outward body. Was he to be always alone? Was there no spot in his future where he could possess himself in reality of the freedom which was his in name?

Without seeing, without hearing, he went almost deliriously where his road led him, for the terror in his thought had become a living presence before which his spirit rather than his body moved. He walked rapidly, yet it seemed to him that his feet were inert and lifeless weights which were dragged forward by the invincible torrent of his will. In the swiftness of his flight, he felt that he was a conscious soul chained to a body that was a corpse.