“Anything wrong?” He had reached the point of his moral degradation when right for Helen meant wrong for him.
Jud, with a characteristic shrewdness, put his finger quickly on the spot.
Edward Conway was sober. Clay saw her daily.
“But jes' wait till I see him ag'in—down there. I'll make him drunk enough. Then you'll see a change in the Queen—hey?”
And he laughed knowingly. With a little more bitterness she would go to the end of the world with him.
It was that day he held her hands in the old familiar way, but when he would kiss her at the gate she still fled, crimson, away.
The next morning Clay Westmore walked with her to the mill, and Travis lilted his eyebrows haughtily:
“If anything of that kind happens,” he said to himself, “nothing can save me.”
He watched her closely—how beautiful she looked that day—how regally beautiful! She had come wearing the blue silk gown, with the lace and beads which had been her mother's. In sheer delight Travis kept slipping to the drawing-in room door to watch her work. Her posture, beautifully Greek, before the machine, so natural that it looked not unlike a harp in her hand; her half-bent head and graceful neck, the flushed face and eyes, the whole picture was like a Titian, rich in color and life.
And she saw him and looked up smiling.