The other turned quickly and looked deep into Richard Travis's eyes. “I can see there is no use of my trying to change your mind, Dick, though I had hoped—”
The other shook his head. It meant a Travis decision, and his cousin knew it.
“But as I started to say, Tom, and there is no need of my mincing words, if you'll raise that boy of mine—” he was silent awhile, then smiling: “He is mine and more of a Travis to-day than his father ever was. If you can help him and his aunt—”
“He shall have the half of it, Dick, and an education, under our care. We will make a man of him, Alice and I.”
Richard Travis said no more.
The week before he left, one beautiful afternoon, he walked over to Millwood for the last time. For Edward Conway was now sheriff of the county, and with the assistance of the old bishop, whose fortune now was secured, he had redeemed his home and was in a fair way to pay back every dollar of it.
A new servant ushered Travis in, for the good old nurse had passed away, the strain of that terrible night being too much, first, for her reason, and afterwards, her life.
Edward Conway was away, but Helen came in presently, and greeted him with such a splendid high-born way, so simple and so unaffected that he marveled at her self-control, feeling his own heart pulsing strangely at sight of her. In the few months that had elapsed how changed she was and how beautiful! This was not the romantic, yet buffeted, beautiful girl who had come so near being the tragedy of his old life? How womanly she now was, and how calm and at her ease! Could independence and the change from poverty and worry, the strong, free feeling of being one's self again and in one's sphere, make so great a difference in so short a while? He wondered at himself for not seeing farther ahead. He had come to bid her good-bye and offer again—this time in all earnestness and sincerity, to take her with him—to share his life—but the words died in his mouth.
He could no more have said them than he could have profanely touched her.
When he left she walked with him to the parting of the ways.