THE DELIVERANCE; A ROMANCE OF THE VIRGINIA TOBACCO FIELDS

By

Ellen Glasgow

1904

CONTENTS

BOOK I. The Inheritance

CHAPTER

I. The Man in the Field

II. The Owner of Blake Hall

III. Showing That a Little Culture Entails Great Care

IV. Of Human Nature in the Raw State

V. The Wreck of the Blakes

VI. Carraway Plays Courtier

VII. In Which a Stand Is Made

VIII. Treats of a Passion That Is Not Love

IX. Cynthia X. Sentimental and Otherwise

BOOK II. The Temptation

I. The Romance That Might Have Been

II. The Romance That Was

III. Fletcher's Move and Christopher's Counterstroke

IV. A Gallant Deed That Leads to Evil

V. The Glimpse of a Bride

VI. Shows Fletcher in a New Light

VII. In Which Hero and Villain Appear as One

VIII. Between the Devil and the Deep Sea

IX. As the Twig Is Bent

X. Powers of Darkness

BOOK III. The Revenge

I. In Which Tobacco Is Hero

II. Between Christopher and Will

III. Mrs. Blake Speaks Her Mind on Several Matters

IV. In Which Christopher Hesitates

V. The Happiness of Tucker

VI. The Wages of Folly

VII. The Toss of a Coin

VIII. In Which Christopher Triumphs

BOOK IV. The Awakening

I. The Unforeseen

II. Maria Returns to the Hall

III. The Day Afterward

IV. The Meeting in the Night

V. Maria Stands on Christopher's Ground

VI. The Growing Light

VII. In which Carraway Speaks the Truth to Maria

VIII. Between Maria and Christopher

IX. Christopher Faces Himself

X. By the Poplar Spring

BOOK V. The Ancient Law

I. Christopher Seeks an Escape

II. The Measure of Maria

III. Will's Ruin

IV. In Which Mrs. Blake's Eyes are Opened

V. Christopher Plants by Moonlight

VI. Treats of the Tragedy Which Wears a Comic Mask

VII. Will Faces Desperation and Stands at Bay

VIII. How Christopher Comes into His Revenge

IX. The Fulfilling of the Law

X. The Wheel of Life

LIST OF CHARACTERS

CHRISTOPHER BLAKE, a tobacco-grower

MRS. BLAKE, his mother

TUCKER CORBIN, an old soldier

CYNTHIA and LILA BLAKE; sisters of Christopher

CARRAWAY, a lawyer

BILL FLETCHER, a wealthy farmer

MARIA FLETCHER, his granddaughter

WILL FLETCHER, his grandson

"MISS SAIDIE," sister of Fletcher

JACOB WEATHERBY, a tobacco-grower

JIM WEATHERBY, his son

SOL PETERKIN, another tobacco-grower

MOLLY PETERKIN, daughter of Sol

Tom SPADE, a country storekeeper

SUSAN, his wife

UNCLE BOAZ, a Negro

Book I

THE INHERITANCE

CHAPTER I. The Man in the Field

When the Susquehanna stage came to the daily halt beneath the blasted pine at the cross-roads, an elderly man, wearing a flapping frock coat and a soft slouch hat, stepped gingerly over one of the muddy wheels, and threw a doubtful glance across the level tobacco fields, where the young plants were drooping in the June sunshine.

"So this is my way, is it?" he asked, with a jerk of his thumb toward a cloud of blue-and-yellow butterflies drifting over a shining puddle—"five miles as the crow flies, and through a bog?"

For a moment he hung suspended above the encrusted axle, peering with blinking pale-gray eyes over a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. In his appearance there was the hint of a scholarly intention unfulfilled, and his dress, despite its general carelessness, bespoke a different standard of taste from that of the isolated dwellers in the surrounding fields. A casual observer might have classified him as one of the Virginian landowners impoverished by the war; in reality, he was a successful lawyer in a neighbouring town, who, amid the overthrow of the slaveholding gentry some twenty years before, had risen into a provincial prominence.

His humour met with a slow response from the driver, who sat playfully flicking at a horsefly on the flank of a tall, raw-boned sorrel. "Wall, thar's been a sight of rain lately," he observed, with goodnatured acquiescence, "but I don't reckon the mud's more'n waist deep, an' if you do happen to git clean down, thar's Sol Peterkin along to pull you out. Whar're you hidin', Sol? Why, bless my boots, if he ain't gone fast asleep!"

At this a lean and high-featured matron, encased in the rigidity of her Sunday bombazine, gave a prim poke with her umbrella in the ribs of a sparrow-like little man, with a discoloured, scraggy beard, who nodded in one corner of the long seat.

"I'd wake up if I was you," she remarked in the voice her sex assumes when virtue lapses into severity.

Starting from his doze, the little man straightened his wiry, sunburned neck and mechanically raised his hand to wipe away a thin stream of tobacco juice which trickled from his half-open mouth.

"Hi!we ain't got here a'ready!" he exclaimed, as he spat energetically into the mud. "I d'clar if it don't beat all—one minute we're thar an' the next we're here. It's a movin' world we live in, ain't that so, mum?" Then, as the severe matron still stared unbendingly before her, he descended between the wheels, and stood nervously scraping his feet in the long grass by the roadside.

"This here's Sol Peterkin, Mr. Carraway," said the driver, bowing his introduction as he leaned forward to disentangle the reins from the sorrel's tail, "an' I reckon he kin pint out Blake Hall to you as well as another, seem' as he was under-overseer thar for eighteen years befo' the war. Now you'd better climb in agin, folks; it's time we were off."

He gave an insinuating cluck to the horses, while several passengers, who had alighted to gather blackberries from the ditch, scrambled hurriedly into their places. With a single clanking wrench the stage toiled on, plodding clumsily over the miry road.

As the spattering mud-drops fell round him, Carraway lifted his head and sniffed the air like a pointer that has been just turned afield. For the moment his professional errand escaped him as his chest expanded in the light wind which blew over the radiant stillness of the Virginian June. From the cloudless sky to its pure reflection in the rain-washed roads there was barely a descending shade, and the tufts of dandelion blooming against the rotting rail fence seemed but patches of the clearer sunshine.

"Bless my soul, it's like a day out of Scripture!" he exclaimed in a tone that was half-apologetic; then raising his walking-stick he leisurely swept it into space. "There's hardly another crop, I reckon, between here and the Hall?"

Sol Peterkin was busily cutting a fresh quid of tobacco from the plug he carried in his pocket, and there was a brief pause before he answered. Then, as he carefully wiped the blade of his knife on the leg of his blue jean overalls, he looked up with a curious facial contortion.

"Oh, you'll find a corn field or two somewhar along," he replied, "but it's a lanky, slipshod kind of crop at best, for tobaccy's king down here, an' no mistake. We've a sayin' that the man that ain't partial to the weed can't sleep sound even in the churchyard, an' thar's some as 'ill swar to this day that Willie Moreen never rested in his grave because he didn't chaw, an' the soil smelt jest like a plug. Oh, it's a great plant, I tell you, suh. Look over thar at them fields; they've all been set out sence the spell o' rain."

The road they followed crawled like a leisurely river between the freshly ploughed ridges, where the earth was slowly settling around the transplanted crop. In the distance, labourers were still at work, passing in dull-blue blotches between the rows of bright-green leaves that hung limply on their slender stalks.

"You've lived at the Hall, I hear," said Carraway, suddenly turning to look at his companion over his lowered glasses.

"When it was the Hall, suh," replied Sol, with a tinge of bitterness in his chuckle. "Why, in my day, an' that was up to the very close of the war, you might stand at the big gate an' look in any direction you pleased till yo' eyes bulged fit to bust, but you couldn't look past the Blake land for all yo' tryin'. These same fields here we're passin' through I've seen set out in Blake tobaccy time an' agin, an' the farm I live on three miles beyond the Hall belonged to the old gentleman, God bless him! up to the day he died. Lord save my soul! three hunnard as likely niggers as you ever clap sight on, an' that not countin' a good fifty that was too far gone to work."

"All scattered now, I suppose?"

"See them little cabins over yonder?" With a dirty forefinger he pointed to the tiny trails of smoke hanging low above the distant tree-tops. "The county's right speckled with 'em an' with thar children—all named Blake arter old marster, as they called him, or Corbin arter old miss. When leetle Mr. Christopher got turned out of the Hall jest befo' his pa died, an' was shuffled into the house of the overseer, whar Bill Fletcher used to live himself, the darkies all bought bits o'land here an' thar an' settled down to do some farmin' on a free scale. Stuck up, suh! Why, Zebbadee Blake passed me yestiddy drivin' his own mule-team, an' I heard him swar he wouldn't turn out o' the road for anybody less'n God A'mighty or Marse Christopher!"

"A-ahem!" exclaimed Carraway, with relish; "and in the meantime, the heir to all this high-handed authority is no better than an illiterate day-labourer."

Peterkin snorted. "Who? Mr. Christopher? Well, he warn't more'n ten years old when his pa went doty an' died, an' I don't reckon he's had much larnin' sence. I've leant on the gate myself an' watched the nigger children traipsin' by to the Yankee woman's school, an' he drivin' the plough when he didn't reach much higher than the handle. He' used to be the darndest leetle brat, too, till his sperits got all freezed out o' him. Lord! Lord! thar's such a sight of meanness in this here world that it makes a body b'lieve in Providence whether or no."

Carraway meditatively twirled his walking-stick. "Raises tobacco now like the rest, doesn't he?"

"Not like the rest—bless you, no, suh. Why, the weed thrives under his very touch, though he can't abide the smell of it, an' thar's not a farmer in the county that wouldn't ruther have him to plant, cut, or cure than any ten men round about. They do say that his pa went clean crazy about tobaccy jest befo' he died, an' that Mr. Christopher gets dead sick when he smells it smokin' in the barn, but he kin pick up a leaf blindfold an' tell you the quality of it at his first touch."

For a moment the lawyer was silent, pondering a thought he evidently did not care to utter. When at last he spoke it was in the measured tones of one who overcomes an impediment in his speech.

"Do you happen to have heard, I wonder, anything of his attitude toward the present owner of the Hall?"

"Happen to have heard!" Peterkin threw back his head and gasped. "Why, the whole county has happened to hear of it, I reckon. It's been common talk sence the day he got his first bird-gun, an' his nigger, Uncle Boaz, found him hidin' in the bushes to shoot old Fletcher when he came in sight. I tell you, if Bill Fletcher lay dyin' in the road, Mr. Christopher would sooner ride right over him than not. You ask some folks, suh, an' they'll tell you a Blake kin hate twice as long as most men kin love."

"Ah, is it so bad as that?" muttered Carraway.

"Well, he ain't much of a Christian, as the lights go," continued Sol, "but I ain't sartain, accordin' to my way of thinkin', that he ain't got a better showin' on his side than a good many of 'em that gits that befo' the preacher. He's a Blake, skin an' bone, anyhow, an' you ain't goin' to git this here county to go agin him—not if he was to turn an' spit at Satan himself. Old Bill Fletcher stole his house an' his land an' his money, law or no law—that's how I look at it—but he couldn't steal his name, an' that's what counts among the niggers, an' the po' whites, too. Why, I've seen a whole parcel o' darkies stand stock still when Fletcher drove up to the bars with his spankin' pair of bays, an' then mos' break tha' necks lettin' 'em down as soon as Mr. Christopher comes along with his team of oxen. You kin fool the quality 'bout the quality, but I'll be blamed if you kin fool the niggers."

Ahead of them there was a scattered group of log cabins, surrounded by little whitewashed palings, and at their approach a decrepit old Negro, followed by a slinking black-and-tan foxhound, came beneath the straggling hopvine over one of the doors and through the open gate out into the road. His bent old figure was huddled within his carefully patched clothes of coarse brown homespun.

"Howdy, marsters," he muttered, in answer to the lawyer's greeting, raising a trembling hand to his wrinkled forehead. "Y'all ain' seen nuttin' er ole miss's yaller cat, Beulah, I reckon?"

Peterkin, who had eyed him with the peculiar disfavour felt for the black man by the low-born white, evinced a sudden interest out of all proportion to Carraway's conception of the loss.

"Ain't she done come back yet, Uncle Boaz?" he inquired.

"Naw, suh, dat she ain', en ole miss she ain' gwine git a wink er sleep dis blessed night. Me en Spy we is done been traipsin' roun' atter dat ar low-lifeted Beulah sence befo' de dinner-bell."

"When did you miss her first?" asked Peterkin, with concern.

"I dunno, suh, dat I don't, caze she ain' no better'n one er dese yer wish-wishys,* an' I ain' mek out yit ef'n twuz her er her hant. Las' night 'bout sundown dar she wuz a-lappin' her sasser er milk right at ole miss feet, en dis mawnin' at sunup dar she warn't. Dat's all I know, suh, ef'n you lay me out."

* Will-o'-the-wisp.

"Well, I reckon she'll turn up agin," said Peterkin consolingly. "Cats air jest like gals, anyway—they ain't never happy unless they're eternally gallyvantin'. Why, that big white Tom of mine knows more about this here county than I do myself."

"Days so, suh; days de gospel trufe; but I'se kinder flustered 'bout dat yaller cat caze ole miss sutney do set a heap er sto' by 'er. She ain' never let de dawgs come in de 'oom, nohow, caze once she done feel Beulah rar 'er back at Spy. She's des stone blin', is ole miss, but I d'clar she kin smell pow'ful keen, an' 'taro' no use tryin' ter fool her wid one houn' er de hull pack. Lawd! Lawd! I wunner ef dat ar cat kin be layin' close over yonder at Sis Daphne's?"

He branched off into a little path which ran like a white thread across the field, grumbling querulously to the black-and-tan foxhound that ambled at his heels.

"Dar's a wallopin' ahaid er you, sho's you bo'n," he muttered, as he limped on toward a small log hut from which floated an inviting fragrance of bacon frying in fat. "I reckon you lay dat you kin cut yo' mulatter capers wid me all you please, but you'd better look out sharp 'fo' you begin foolin' 'long er Marse Christopher. Dar you go agin, now. Ain' dat des like you? Wat you wanter go sickin' atter dat ole hyar fer, anyhow?"

"So that is one of young Blake's hangers-on?" observed Carraway, with a slight inflection of inquiry.

"Uncle Boaz, you mean? Oh, he was the old gentleman's body-servant befo' the war. He used to wear his marster's cast-off ruffles an' high hat. A mighty likely nigger he was, too, till he got all bent up with the rheumatics."

The lawyer had lifted his walking-stick and was pointing straight ahead to a group of old brick chimneys huddled in the sunset above a grove of giant oaks.

"That must be Blake Hall over there," he said; "there's not another house like it in the three counties."

"We'll be at the big gate in a minute, suh," Peterkin returned. "This is the first view of the Hall you git, an' they say the old gentleman used to raise his hat whenever he passed by it." Then as they swung open the great iron gate, with its new coat of red, he touched Carraway's sleeve and spoke in a hoarse whisper. "Thar's Mr. Christopher himself over yonder," he said, "an' Lord bless my soul, if he ain't settin' out old Fletcher's plants. Thar! he's standin' up now—the big young fellow with the basket. The old gentleman was the biggest man twixt here an' Fredericksburg, but I d'clar Mr. Christopher is a good half-head taller!"

At his words Carraway stopped short in the road, raising his useless glasses upon his brow. The sun had just gone down in a blaze of light, and the great bare field was slowly darkening against the west.

Nearer at hand there were the long road, already in twilight, the rail fence wrapped in creepers, and a solitary chestnut tree in full bloom. Farther away swept the freshly ploughed ground over which passed the moving figures of the labourers transplanting the young crop. Of them all, Carraway saw but a single worker—in reality, only one among the daily toilers in the field, moulded physically perhaps in a finer shape than they, and limned in the lawyer's mental vision against a century of the brilliant if tragic history of his race. As he moved slowly along between the even rows, dropping from time to time a plant into one of the small holes dug before him, and pausing with the basket on his arm to settle the earth carefully with his foot, he seemed, indeed, as much the product of the soil upon which he stood as did the great white chestnut growing beside the road. In his pose, in his walk, in the careless carriage of his head, there was something of the large freedom of the elements.

"A dangerous young giant," observed the lawyer slowly, letting his glasses fall before his eyes. "A monumental Blake, as it were. Well, as I have remarked before upon occasions, blood will tell, even at the dregs."

"He's the very spit of his pa, that's so," replied Peterkin, "an' though it's no business of mine, I'm afeared he's got the old gentleman's dry throat along with it. Lord! Lord! I've always stood it out that it's better to water yo' mouth with tobaccy than to burn it up with sperits." He checked himself and fell back hastily, for young Blake, after a single glance at the west, had tossed his basket carelessly aside, and was striding vigorously across the field.

"Not another plant will I set out, and that's an end of it!" he was saying angrily. "I agreed to do a day's work and I've been at it steadily since sunrise. Is it any concern of mine, I'd like to know, if he can't put in his crop to-night? Do you think I care whether his tobacco rots in the ground or out of it?"

As he came on, Carraway measured him coolly, with an appreciation tempered by his native sense of humour. He perceived at once a certain coarseness of finish which, despite the deep-rooted veneration for an idle ancestry, is found most often in the descendants of a long line of generous livers. A moment later he weighed the keen gray flash of the eyes beneath the thick fair hair, the coating of dust and sweat over the high-bred curve from brow to nose, and the fullness of the jaw which bore with a suggestion of sheer brutality upon the general impression of a fine racial type. Taken from the mouth up, the face might have passed as a pure, fleshly copy of the antique idea; seen downward, it became almost repelling in its massive power.

Stooping beside the fence for a common harvest hat, the young man placed it on his head, and gave a careless nod to Peterkin. He had thrown one leg over the rails, and was about to swing himself into the road, when Sol spoke a little timidly.

"I hear yo' ma's done lost her yaller cat, Mr. Christopher."

For an instant Christopher hung midway of the fence.

"Isn't the beast back yet?" he asked irritably, scraping the mud from his boot upon the rail. "I've had Uncle Boaz scouring the county half the day."

A pack of hounds that had been sleeping under the sassafras bushes across the road came fawning to his feet, and he pushed them impatiently aside.

"I was thinkin'," began Peterkin, with an uncertain cough, "that I might manage to send over my big white Tom, an', bein' blind, maybe she wouldn't know the difference."

Christopher shook his head.

"Oh, it's no use," he replied, speaking with an air of superiority. "She could pick out that cat among a million, I believe, with a single touch. Well, there's no help for it. Down, Spot—down, I say, Sir!"

With a leisurely movement he swung himself from the fence, stopping to wipe his brow with his blue cotton sleeve. Then he went whistling defiantly down the way to the Hall, turning at last into a sunken road that trailed by an abandoned ice-pond where bullfrogs were croaking hoarsely in the rushes.

CHAPTER II. The Owner of Blake Hall

As they followed the descending road between flowering chestnuts, Blake Hall rose gradually into fuller view, its great oaks browned by the approaching twilight and the fading after-glow reflected in a single visible pane. Seen close at hand, the house presented a cheerful spaciousness of front—a surety of light and air—produced in part by the clean white, Doric columns of the portico and in part by the ample slope of shaven lawn studded with reds of brightly blooming flowers. From the smoking chimneys presiding over the ancient roof to the hospitable steps leading from the box-bordered walk below, the outward form of the dwelling spoke to the imaginative mind of that inner spirit which had moulded it into a lasting expression of a racial sentiment, as if the Virginia creeper covering the old brick walls had wreathed them in memories as tenacious as itself.

For more than two hundred years Blake Hall had stood as the one great house in the county—a manifestation in brick and mortar of the hereditary greatness of the Blakes. To Carraway, impersonal as his interest was, the acknowledgment brought a sudden vague resentment, and for an instant he bit his lip and hung irresolute, as if more than half-inclined to retrace his steps. A slight thing decided him—the gaiety of a boy's laugh that floated from one of the lower rooms and swinging his stick briskly to add weight to his determination, he ascended the broad steps and lifted the old brass knocker. A moment later the door was opened by a large mulatto woman, in a soiled apron, who took his small hand-bag from him and, when he asked for Mr. Fletcher, led him across the great hall into the unused drawing-room.

The shutters were closed, and as she flung them back on their rusty hinges the pale June twilight entered with the breath of mycrophylla roses. In the scented dusk Carraway stared about the desolate, crudely furnished room, which gave back to his troubled fancy the face of a pitiable, dishonoured corpse. The soul of it was gone forever—that peculiar spirit of place which makes every old house the guardian of an inner life—the keeper of a family's ghost. What remained was but the outer husk, the disfigured frame, upon which the newer imprint seemed only a passing insult.

On the high wainscoted walls he could still trace the vacant dust-marked squares where the Blake portraits had once hung—lines that the successive scrubbings of fifteen years had not utterly effaced. A massive mahogany sofa, carved to represent a horn of plenty, had been purchased, perhaps at a general sale of the old furniture, with several quaint rosewood chairs and a rare cabinet of inlaid woods. For the rest, the later additions were uniformly cheap and ill-chosen—a blue plush "set," bought, possibly, at a village store, a walnut table with a sallow marble top, and several hard engravings of historic subjects.

When the lawyer turned from a curious inspection of these works of art, he saw that only a curtain of flimsy chintz, stretched between a pair of fluted columns, separated him from the adjoining room, where a lamp, with lowered wick, was burning under a bright red shade. After a moment's hesitation he drew the curtain aside and entered what he took at once to be the common living-room of the Fletcher family.

Here the effect was less depressing, though equally uninteresting—a paper novel or two on the big Bible upon the table combined, indeed, with a costly piano in one corner, to strike a note that was entirely modern. The white crocheted tidies on the chair-backs, elaborated with endless patience out of innumerable spools of darning cotton, lent a feminine touch to the furniture, which for an instant distracted Carraway's mental vision from the impending personality of Fletcher himself. He remembered now that there was a sister whom he had heard vaguely described by the women of his family as "quite too hopeless," and a granddaughter of whom he knew merely that she had for years attended an expensive school somewhere in the North. The grandson he recalled, after a moment, more distinctly, as a pretty, undeveloped boy in white pinafores, who had once accompanied Fletcher upon a hurried visit to the town. The gay laugh had awakened the incident in his mind, and he saw again the little cleanly clad figure perched upon his desk, nibbling bakers' buns, while he transacted a tedious piece of business with the vulgar grandfather.

He was toying impatiently with these recollections when his attention was momentarily attracted by the sound of Fletcher's burly tones on the rear porch just beyond the open window.

"I tell you, you've set all the niggers agin me, and I can't get hands to work the crops."

"That's your lookout, of course," replied a voice, which he associated at once with young Blake. "I told you I'd work three days because I wanted the ready money; I've got it, and my time is my own again."

"But I say my tobacco's got to get into the ground this week—it's too big for the plant-bed a'ready, and with three days of this sun the earth'll be dried as hard as a rock."

"There's no doubt of it, I think."

"And it's all your blamed fault," burst out the other angrily; "you've gone and turned them all agin me—white and black alike. Why, it's as much as I can do to get a stroke of honest labour in this nigger-ridden country."

Christopher laughed shortly.

"There is no use blaming the Negroes," he said, and his pronunciation of the single word would have stamped him in Virginia as of a different class from Fletcher; "they're usually ready enough to work if you treat them decently."

"Treat them!" began Fletcher, and Carraway was about to fling open the shutters, when light steps passed quickly along the hall and he heard the rustle of a woman's silk dress against the wainscoting.

"There's a stranger to see you, grandfather," called a girl's even voice from the house; "finish paying off the hands and come in at once."

"Well, of all the impudence!" exclaimed the young man, with a saving dash of humour. Then, without so much as a parting word, he ran quickly down the steps and started rapidly in the direction of the darkening road, while the silk dress rustled upon the porch and at the garden gate as the latch was lifted.

"Go in, grandfather!" called the girl's voice from the garden, to which Fletcher responded as decisively.

"For Heaven's sake, let me manage my own affairs, Maria. You seem to have inherited your poor mother's pesky habit of meddling."

"Well, I told you a gentleman was waiting," returned the girl stubbornly. "You didn't let us know he was coming, either, and Lindy says there isn't a thing fit to eat for supper."

Fletcher snorted, and then, before entering the house, stopped to haggle with an old Negro woman for a pair of spring chickens hanging dejectedly from her outstretched hand, their feet tied together with a strip of faded calico.

"How much you gwine gimme fer dese, marster?" she inquired anxiously, deftly twirling them about until they swung with heads aloft.

Rising to the huckster's instinct, Fletcher poked the offerings suspiciously beneath their flapping wings.

"Thirty cents for the pair—not a copper more," he responded promptly; "they're as poor as Job's turkey, both of 'em."

"Lawdy, marster, you know better'n dat."

"They're skin and bones, I tell you; feel 'em yourself. Well, take it or leave it, thirty cents is all I'll give."

"Go 'way f'om yere, suh; dese yer chickings ain' no po' w'ite trash—dey's been riz on de bes' er de lan', dey is—en de aigs dey wuz hatched right dar in de middle er de baid whar me en my ole man en de chillun sleep. De hull time dat black hen wuz a-settin', Cephus he was bleeged ter lay right spang on de bar' flo' caze we'uz afeared de aigs 'ould addle. Lawd! Lawd! dey wuz plum three weeks a-hatchin', en de weather des freeze thoo en thoo. Cephus he's been crippled up wid de rheumatics ever sence. Go 'way f'om yer, marster. I warn't bo'n yestiddy. Thirty cents!"

"Not a copper more, I tell you. Let me go, my good woman; I can't stand here all night."

"Des a minute, marster. Dese yer chickings ain' never sot dey feet on de yearth, caze dey's been riz right in de cabin, en dey's done et dar vittles outer de same plate wid me en Cephus. Ef'n dey spy a chice bit er bacon on de een er de knife hit 'uz moughty likely ter fin' hits way down dir throat instid er down me en Cephus'."

"Let me go, I say—I don't want your blamed chickens; take 'em home again."

"Hi! marster, I'se Mehitable. You ain't fergot how peart I use ter wuk w'en you wuz over me in ole marster's day. You know you ain' fergot Mehitable, suh. Ain't you recollect de time ole marster gimme a dollar wid his own han' caze I foun' de biggest wum in de hull 'baccy patch? Lawd! dey wuz times, sho's you bo'n. I kin see ole marster now es plain es ef twuz yestiddy, so big en shiny like satin, wid his skin des es tight es a watermillion's."

"Shut up, confound you!" cut in Fletcher sharply.

"If you don't stop your chatter I'll set the dogs on you. Shut up, I say!"

He strode into the house, slamming the heavy door behind him, and a moment afterward Carraway heard him scolding brutally at the servants across the hall.

The old Negress had gone muttering from the porch with her unsold chickens, when the door softly opened again, and the girl, who had entered through the front with her basket of flowers, came out into the growing moonlight.

"Wait a moment, Aunt Mehitable," she said. "I want to speak to you."

Aunt Mehitable turned slowly, putting a feeble hand to her dazed eyes. "You ain' ole miss come back agin, is you, honey?" she questioned doubtfully.

"I don't know who your old miss was," replied the girl, "but I am not she, whoever she may have been. I am Maria Fletcher. You don't remember me—yet you used to bake me ash-cakes when I was a little girl."

The old woman shook her head. "You ain' Marse Fletcher's chile?"

"His granddaughter—but I must go in to supper. Here is the money for your chickens—grandpa was only joking; you know he loves to joke. Take the chickens to the hen-house and get something hot to eat in the kitchen before you start out again."

She ran hurriedly up the steps and entered the hall just as
Fletcher was shaking hands with his guest.

CHAPTER III. Showing that a Little Culture Entails Great Care

Carraway had risen to meet his host in a flutter that was almost one of dread. In the eight years since their last interview it seemed to him that his mental image of his great client had magnified in proportions—that Fletcher had "out-Fletchered" himself, as he felt inclined to put it. The old betrayal of his employer's dependence, which at first had been merely a suspicion in the lawyer's mind, had begun gradually, as time went on, to bristle with the points of significant details. In looking back, half-hinted things became clear to him at last, and he gathered, bit by bit, the whole clever, hopeless villainy of the scheme—the crime hedged about by law with all the prating protection of a virtue. He knew now that Fletcher—the old overseer of the Blake slaves—had defrauded the innocent as surely as if he had plunged his great red fist into the little pocket of a child, had defrauded, indeed, with so strong a blow that the very consciousness of his victim had been stunned. There had been about his act all the damning hypocrisy of a great theft—all the air of stern morality which makes for the popular triumph of the heroic swindler.

These things Carraway understood, yet as the man strode into the room with open palm and a general air of bluff hospitality—as if he had just been blown by some fresh strong wind across his tobacco fields—the lawyer experienced a relief so great that the breath he drew seemed a fit measure of his earlier foreboding. For Fletcher outwardly was but the common type of farmer, after all, with a trifle more intelligence, perhaps, than is met with in the average Southerner of his class. "A plain man but honest, sir," was what one expected him to utter at every turn. It was written in the coarse open lines of his face, half-hidden by a bushy gray beard; in his small sparkling eyes, now blue, now brown; in his looselimbed, shambling movements as he crossed the room. His very clothes spoke, to an acute observer, of a masculine sincerity naked and unashamed—as if his large coffee-spotted cravat would not alter the smallest fold to conceal the stains it bore. Hale, hairy, vehement, not without a quality of Rabelaisian humour, he appeared the last of all men with whom one would associate the burden of a troubled conscience.

"Sorry to have kept you—on my word I am," he began heartily; "but to tell the truth, I thought thar'd be somebody in the house with sense enough to show you to a bedroom. Like to run up now for a wash before supper?"

It was what one expected of him, such a speech blurted in so offhand a manner, and the lawyer could barely suppress a threatening laugh.

"Oh, it was a short trip," he returned, "and a walk of five miles on a day like this is one of the most delightful things in life. I've been looking out at your garden, by the way, and—I may as well confess it—overhearing a little of your conversation."

"Is that so?" chuckled Fletcher, his great eyebrows overhanging his eyes like a mustache grown out of place. "Well, you didn't hear anything to tickle your ears, I reckon. I've been having a row with that cantankerous fool, Blake. The queer thing about these people is that they seem to think I'm to blame every time they see a spot on their tablecloths. Mark my words, it ain't been two years since I found that nigger Boaz digging in my asparagus bed, and he told me he was looking for some shoots for ole miss's dinner."

"The property idea is very strong in these rural counties, you see," remarked the lawyer gravely. "They feel that every year adds a value to the hereditary possession of land, and that when an estate has borne a single name for a century there has been a veritable impress placed upon it. Your asparagus bed is merely an item; you find, I fancy, other instances."

Fletcher turned in his chair.

"That's the whole blamed rotten truth," he admitted, waving his great red hand toward the door; "but let's have supper first and settle down to talk on a full stomach. Thar's no hurry with all night before us, and that, to come to facts, is why I sent for you. No lawyer's office for me when I want to talk business, but an easy-chair by my own table and a cup of coffee beforehand."

As he finished, a bell jangled in the hall, and the door opened to admit the girl whom Carraway had seen a little earlier upon the porch.

"Supper's a good hour late, Maria," grumbled Fletcher, looking at his heavy silver watch, "and I smelt the bacon frying at six o'clock."

For an instant the girl looked as if she had more than half an intention to slap his face; then quickly recovering her self-possession, she smiled at Carraway and held out a small white hand with an air of quiet elegance which was the most noticeable thing in her appearance.

"I am quite a stranger to you, Mr. Carraway," she said, with a laugh, "but if you had only known it, I had a doll named after you when I was very small. Guy Carraway!—it seemed to me all that was needed to make a fairy tale."

The lawyer joined in her laugh, which never rose above a carefully modulated minor. "I confess that I once took the same view of it, my dear young lady," he returned, "so I ended by dropping the name and keeping only the initial. Your grandfather will tell you that I am now G. Carraway and nothing more. I couldn't afford, as things were, to make a fairy tale of my life, you see."

"Oh, if one only could!" said the girl, lowering her full dark eyes, which gave a piteous lie to her sullen mouth.

She was artificial, Carraway told himself with emphasis, and yet the distinction of manner—the elegance—was certainly the point at which her training had not failed. He felt it in her tall, straight figure, absurdly overdressed for a granddaughter of Fletcher's; in her smooth white hands, with their finely polished nails; in her pale, repressed face, which he called plain while admitting that it might become interesting; in her shapely head even with its heavy cable of coal-black hair.

What she was her education had made of her—the look of serene distinction, the repose of her thin-featured, colourless face, refined beyond the point of prettiness—these things her training had given her, and these were the things which Carraway, with his old-fashioned loyalty to a strong class prejudice, found himself almost resenting. Bill Fletcher's granddaughter had, he felt, no right to this rare security of breeding which revealed itself in every graceful fold of the dress she wore, for with Fletcher an honest man she would have been, perhaps, but one of the sallow, over-driven drudges who stare like helpless effigies from the little tumbledown cabins along country roadsides.

Fletcher, meanwhile, had filled in the pause with one of his sudden burly dashes into speech.

"Maria has been so long at her high-and-mighty boarding-school," he said, "that I reckon her head's as full of fancies as a cheese is of maggots. She's even got a notion that she wants to turn out all this new stuff—to haul the old rubbish back again but I say wait till the boy comes on—then we'll see, we'll see."

"And in the meantime we'll go in to supper," put in the girl with a kind of hopeless patience, though Carraway could see that she smarted as from a blow. "This is Will, Mr. Carraway," she added almost gaily, skillfully sweeping her train from about the feet of a pretty, undersized boy of fourteen years, who had burst into the room with his mouth full of bread and jam. "He's quite the pride of the family, you know, because he's just taken all the honours of his school."

"History, 'rithmatic, Latin—all the languages," rolled out Fletcher in a voice that sounded like a tattoo. "I can't keep up with 'em, but they're all thar, ain't they, sonny?"

"Oh, you could never say 'em off straight, grandpa," retorted the boy, with the pertness of a spoiled girl, at which, to Carraway's surprise, Fletcher fairly chuckled with delight.

"That's so; I'm a plain man, the Lord knows," he admitted, his coarse face crinkling like a sundried leaf of tobacco.

"We've got chickens for supper—broiled," the boy chattered on, putting out his tongue at his sister; "that's why Lindy's havin' it an hour late she's been picking 'em, with Aunt Mehitable helping her for the feathers. Now don't shake your head at me, Maria, because it's no use pretending we have 'em every night, like old Mrs. Blake."

"Bless my soul!" gasped Fletcher, nettled by the last remark. "Do you mean to tell me those Blakes are fools enough to eat spring chicken when they could get forty cents apiece for 'em in the open market?"

"The old lady does," corrected the boy glibly. "The one who wears the queer lace cap and sits in the big chair by the hearth all day—and all night, too, Tommy Spade says, 'cause he peeped through once at midnight and she was still there, sitting so stiff that it scared him and he ran away. Well, Aunt Mehitable sold her a dozen, and she got a side of bacon and a bag of meal."

"Grandfather, you've forgotten Aunt Saidie," broke in Maria, as Fletcher was about to begin his grace without waiting for a dumpy little woman, in purple calico, who waddled with an embarrassed air from her hasty preparations in the pantry. At first Carraway had mistaken her for an upper servant, but as she came forward Maria laid her hand playfully upon her arm and introduced her with a sad little gaiety of manner. "I believe she has met one of your sisters in Fredericksburg," she added, after a moment. Clearly she had determined to accept the family in the lump, with a resolution that—had it borne less resemblance to a passive rage could not have failed to glorify a nobler martyrdom. It was not affection that fortified her—beyond her first gently tolerant glance at the boy there had been only indifference in her pale, composed face—and the lawyer was at last brought to the surprising conclusion that Fletcher's granddaughter was seeking to build herself a fetish of the mere idle bond of blood. The hopeless gallantry of the girl moved him to a vague feeling of pity, and he spoke presently with a chivalrous desire of making her failure easy.

"It was Susan, I think," he said pleasantly, shaking hands with the squat little figure in front of him, "I remember her speaking of it afterward."

"I met her at a church festival one Christmas Eve," responded Aunt Saidie, in a high-pitched, rasping voice. "The same evening that I got this pink crocheted nuby." She touched a small pointed shawl about her shoulders. "Miss Belinda Beale worked it and it was raffled off for ten cents a chance."

Her large, plump face, overflushed about the nose, had a natural kindliness of expression which Carraway found almost appealing; and he concluded that as a girl she might have possessed a common prettiness of feature. Above her clear blue eyes a widening parting divided her tightly crimped bands of hair, which still showed a bright chestnut tint in the gray ripples.

"Thar, thar, Saidie," Fletcher interrupted with a frank brutality, which the lawyer found more repelling than the memory of his stolen fortune. "Mr. Carraway doesn't want to hear about your fascinator. He'd a long ways rather have you make his coffee."

The little woman flushed purple and drew back her chair with an ugly noise from the head of the lavishly spread table.

"Set down right thar, suh," she stammered, her poor little pretense of ease gone from her, "right thar between Brother Bill and me."

"You did say it, Aunt Saidie, I told you you would," screamed the pert boy, beginning an assault upon an enormous dish of batterbread.

Maria flinched visibly. "Be silent, Will," she ordered.
"Grandfather, you must really make Will learn to be polite."

"Now, now, Maria, you're too hard on us," protested Fletcher, flinging himself bodily into the breach, "boys will be boys, you know—they warn't born gals."

"But she did say it, Maria," insisted the boy, "and she bet me a whole dish of doughnuts she wouldn't. She did say 'set'; I heard her." Maria bit her lip, and her flashing eyes filled with angry tears, while Carraway, as he began talking hurriedly about the promise of tobacco, resisted valiantly an impulse to kick the pretty boy beneath the table. As his eyes traveled about the fine old room, marking its mellow wainscoting and the whitened silver handles on the heavy doors, he found himself wondering with implacable approval if this might not be the beginning of a great atonement.

The boy's mood had varied at the sight of his sister's tears, and he fell to patting penitently the hand that quivered on the table. "You needn't give me the doughnuts, Aunt Saidie; I'll make believe you didn't say it," he whispered at last.

"Do you take sugar, Mr. Carraway?" asked Miss Saidie, flushed and tremulous at the head of the overcrowded table, with its massive modern silver service. Poor little woman, thought the lawyer, with his first positive feeling of sympathy, she would have been happier frying her own bacon amid bouncing children in a labourer's cabin. He leaned toward her, speaking with a grave courtesy, which she met with the frightened, questioning eyes of a child. She was "quite too hopeless," he reluctantly admitted —yet, despite himself, he felt a sudden stir of honest human tenderness—the tenderness he had certainly not felt for Fletcher, nor for the pretty, pert boy, nor even for the elegant Maria herself.

"I was looking out at the dear old garden awhile ago," he said, "and I gathered from it that you must be fond of flowers—since your niece tells me she has been away so long."

She brightened into animation, her broad, capable hands fumbling with the big green-and-gold teacups.

"Yes, I raise 'em," she answered. "Did you happen to notice the bed of heartsease? I worked every inch of that myself last spring—and now I'm planting zinnias, and touch-me-nots, and sweet-williams they'll all come along later."

"And prince's-feather," added the lawyer, reminiscently; "that used to be a favourite of mine, I remember, when I was a country lad."

"I've got a whole border of 'em out at the back large, fine plants, too—but Maria wants to root 'em up. She says they're vulgar because they grow in all the niggers' yards."

"Vulgar!" So this was the measure of Maria, Carraway told himself, as he fell into his pleasant ridicule. "Why, if God Almighty ever created a vulgar flower, my dear young lady, I have yet to see it."

"But don't you think it just a little gaudy for a lawn," suggested the girl, easily stung to the defensive.

"It looks cheerful and I like it," insisted Aunt Saidie, emboldened by a rare feeling of support. "Ma used to have two big green tubs of it on either side the front door when we were children, and we used to stick it in our hats and play we was real fine folks. Don't you recollect it, Brother Bill?"

"Good Lord, Saidie, the things you do recollect!" exclaimed Fletcher, who, beneath the agonised eyes of Maria, was drinking his coffee from his saucer in great spluttering gulps.

The girl was in absolute torture: this Carraway saw in the white, strained, nervous intensity of her look; yet the knowledge served only to irritate him, so futile appeared any attempt to soften the effect of Fletcher's grossness. Before the man's colossal vulgarity of soul, mere brutishness of manner seemed but a trifling phase.

CHAPTER IV. Of Human Nature in the Raw State

When at last the pickles and preserved watermelon rind had been presented with a finishing flourish, and Carraway had successfully resisted Miss Saidie's final passionate insistence in the matter of the big blackberry roll before her, Fletcher noisily pushed back his chair, and, with a careless jerk of his thumb in the direction of his guest, stamped across the hall into the family sitting-room.

"Now we'll make ourselves easy and fall to threshing things out," he remarked, filling a blackened brier-root pipe, into the bowl of which he packed the tobacco with his stubby forefinger. "Yes, I'm a lover of the weed, you see—don't you smoke or chaw, suh?"

Carraway shook his head. "When I was young and wanted to I couldn't," he explained, "and now that I am old and can I have unfortunately ceased to want to. I've passed the time of life when a man begins a habit merely for the sake of its being a habit."

"Well, I reckon you're wise as things go, though for my part I believe I took to the weed before I did to my mother's breast. I cut my first tooth on a plug, she used to say."

He threw himself into a capacious cretonne-covered chair, and, kicking his carpet slippers from him, sat swinging one massive foot in its gray yarn sock. Through the thickening smoke Carraway watched the complacency settle over his great hairy face.

"And now, to begin with the beginning, what do you think of my grandchildren?" he demanded abruptly, taking his pipe from his mouth after a long, sucking breath, and leaning forward with his elbow on the arm of his chair.

The other hesitated. "You've done well by them, I should say."

"A fine pair, eh?"

"The admission is easy."

"Look at the gal, now," burst out Fletcher impulsively. "Would you fancy, to see her stepping by, that her grandfather used to crack the whip over a lot of dirty niggers?" He drove the fact in squarely with big, sure blows of his fist, surveying it with an enthusiasm the other found amazing. "Would you fancy, even," he continued after a moment, "that her father warn't as good as I am—that he left overseeing to jine the army, and came out to turn blacksmith if I hadn't kept him till he drank himself to death? His wife? Why, the woman couldn't read her own name unless you printed it in letters as long as your finger—and now jest turn and look at Maria!" he wound up in a puff of smoke.

"The girl's wonderful," admitted Carraway. "She's like a dressed-up doll-baby, too; all the natural thing has been squeezed out of her, and she's stuffed with sawdust."

"It's a pity she ain't a little better looking in the face," pursued Fletcher, waving the criticism aside. "She's a plagued sight too pale and squinched-up for my taste—for all her fine air. I like 'em red and juicy, and though you won't believe me, most likely she can't hold a tallow candle to what Saidie was when she was young. But then, Saidie never had her chance, and Maria's had 'em doubled over. Why, she left home as soon as she'd done sucking, and she hasn't spent a single summer here since she was eight years old. Small thanks I'll get for it, I reckon, but I've done a fair turn by Maria."

"The boy comes next, I suppose?" Carraway broke in, watching the other's face broaden into a big, purple smile.

"Ah, thar you're right—it's the boy I've got my eye on now. His name's the same as mine, you know, and I reckon one day William Fletcher'll make his mark among the quality. He'll have it all, too—the house, the land, everything, except a share of the money which goes to the gal. It'll make her childbearing easier, I reckon, and for my part, that's the only thing a woman's fit for. Don't talk to me about a childless woman! Why, I'd as soon keep a cow that wouldn't calve.

"You were speaking of the boy, I believe," coolly interrupted Carraway. To a man of his old-fashioned chivalric ideal the brutal allusion to the girl was like a deliberate blow in the face.

"So I was—so I was. Well, he's to have it all, I say—every mite, and welcome. I've had a pretty tough life in my time—you can tell it from my hands, suh—but I ain't begrudging it if it leaves the boy a bit better off. Lord, thar's many and many a night,when I was little and my stepfather kicked me out of doors without a bite, that I used to steal into somebody or other's cow-shed and snuggle for warmth into the straw—yes, and suck the udders of the cows for food, too. Oh, I've had a hard enough life, for all the way it looks now—and I'm not saying that if the choice was mine I'd go over it agin even as it stands to-day. We're set here for better or for worse, that's my way of thinking, and if thar's any harm comes of it Providence has got to take a share of the blame."

"Hardly the preacher's view of the matter, is it?"

"Maybe not; and I ain't got a quarrel with 'em, the Lord knows. I go to church like clockwork, and pay my pew-rent, too, which is more than some do that gabble the most about salvation. If I pay for the preacher's keep it's only fair that I should get some of the good that comes to him hereafter; that's how it looks to me; so I don't trouble my head much about the ins and the outs of getting saved or damned. I've never puled in this world, thank God, and let come what will, I ain't going to begin puling in the next. But to go back to whar I started from, it all makes in the end for that pretty little chap over yonder in the dining-room. Rather puny for his years now, but as sound as a nut, and he'll grow, he'll grow. When his mother—poor, worthless drab—gave birth to him and died, I told her it was the best day's work she'd ever done."

Carraway's humour rippled over. "It's easy to imagine what her answer must have been to such a pleasantry," he observed.

"Oh, she was a fool, that woman—a born fool!

Her answer was that it would be the best day for her only when I came to call it the worst. She hated me a long sight more than she hated the devil, and if she was to rise out of her grave to-day she'd probably start right in scrubbing for those darned Blakes."

"Ah!" said Carraway.

"It's the plain truth, but I don't visit it on the little lad. Why should I? He's got my name—I saw to that—and mark my word, he'll grow up yet to marry among the quality."

The secret was out at last—Fletcher's purpose was disclosed, and even in the strong light of his past misdeeds it showed not without a hint of pathos. The very renouncement of any personal ambition served to invest the racial one with a kind of grandeur.

"There's evidently an enviable career before him," said the lawyer at the end of a long pause, "and this brings me, by the way, to the question I wish to as—had your desire to see me any connection with the prospects of your grandson?"

"In a way, yes; though, to tell the truth, it has more to do with that young Blake's. He's been bothering me a good deal of late, and I mean to have it square with him before Bill Fletcher's a year older."

"No difficulty about your title to the estate, I presume?"

"Oh, Lord, no; that's all fair and square, suh. I bought the place, you know, when it went at auction jest a few years after the war. I bought and paid for it right down, and that settled things for good and all."

Carraway considered the fact for a moment. "If I remember correctly—I mean unless gossip went very far afield—the place brought exactly seven thousand dollars." His gaze plunged into the moonlight beyond the open window and followed the clear sweep of the distant fields. "Seven thousand dollars," he added softly; "and there's not a finer in Virginia."

"Thar was nobody to bid agin me, you see," explained Fletcher easily. "The old gentleman was as poor as Job's turkey then, besides going doty mighty fast."

"The common report was, I believe," pursued the lawyer, "that the old man himself did not know of the place being for sale until he heard the auctioneer's hammer on the lawn, and that his mind left him from the moment—this was, of course, mere idle talk."

"Oh, you'll hear anything," snorted Fletcher. "The old gentleman hadn't a red copper to his name, and if he couldn't pay the mortgages, how under heaven could he have bought in the place? As a plain man I put the question."

"But his friends? Where were his friends, I wonder? In his youth he was one of the most popular men in the State—a high liver and good toaster, you remember—and later on he stood well in the Confederate Government. That he should have fallen into abject poverty seems really incomprehensible."

Fletcher twisted in his chair. "Why, that was jest three years after the war, I tell you," he said with irritable emphasis; "he hadn't a friend this side of Jordan, I reckon, who could have raised fifty cents to save his soul. The quality were as bad off as thar own niggers.

"True—true," admitted Carraway; "but the surprising thing is—I don't hesitate to say—that you who had been overseer to the Blakes for twenty years should have been able in those destitute times and on the spot, as it were, to put down seven thousand dollars."

He faced the fact unflinchingly, dragging it from the long obscurity full into the red glare of the lamplight. Here was the main thing, he knew, in Fletcher's history—here was the supreme offense. For twenty years the man had been the trusted servant of his feeble employer, and when the final crash came he had risen with full hands from the wreck. The prodigal Blakes—burning the candle at both ends, people said—had squandered a double fortune before the war, and in an equally stupendous fashion Fletcher had amassed one.

"Oh, thar're ways and ways of putting by a penny," he now protested, "and I turned over a bit during the war, I may as well own up, though folks had only black looks for speculators then."

"We used to call them 'bloodsuckers,' I remember."

"Well, that's neither here nor thar, suh. When the place went for seven thousand I paid it down, and I've managed one way and another—and in spite of the pesky niggers—to make a pretty bit out of the tobacco crop, hard as times have been. The Hall is mine now, thar's no going agin that, and, so help me God, it'll belong to a William Fletcher long after I am dead."

"Ah, that brings us directly to the point."

Fletcher squared himself about in his chair while his pipe went out slowly.

"The point, if you'll have it straight," he said, "is jest this—I want the whole place—every inch of it—and I'll die or git it, as sure's my name's my own. Thar's still that old frame house and the piece of land tacked to it, whar the overseers used to live, cutting straight into the heart of my tobacco fields—in clear view of the Hall, too—right in the middle of my land, I tell you!"

"Oh, I see—I see," muttered Carraway; "that's the little farm in the midst of the estate which the old gentleman—bless his weak head and strong heart gave his wife's brother, Colonel Corbin, who came back crippled from the war. Yes, I remember now, there was a joke at the time about his saying that land was the cheapest present he could give."

"It was all his besotted foolishness, you know to think of a sane man deeding away seventy acres right in the heart of his tract of two thousand. He meant it for a joke, of course. Mr. Tucker or Colonel Corbin, if you choose, was like one of the family, but he was as sensitive as a kid about his wounds, and he wanted to live off somewhar, shut up by himself. Well, he's got enough folks about him now, the Lord knows. Thar's the old lady, and the two gals, and Mr. Christopher, to say nothing of Uncle Boaz and a whole troop of worthless niggers that are eating him out of house and home. Tom Spade has a deed of trust on the place for three hundred dollars; he told me so himself."

"So I understand; and all this is a serious inconvenience to you,
I may suppose."

"Inconvenience! Blood and thunder! It takes the heart right out of my land, I tell you. Why, the very road I cut to save myself half a mile of mudholes came to a dead stop because Mr. Christopher wouldn't let it cross his blamed pasture."

Carraway thoughtfully regarded his finger nails. "Then, bless my soul!—seeing it's your private affair—what are you going to do about it?" he inquired.

"Git it. The devil knows how—I don't; but git it I will. I brought you down here to talk those fools over, and I mean you to do it. It's all spite, pure, rotten spite; that's what it is. Look here, I'll gladly give 'em three thousand dollars for that strip of land, and it wouldn't bring nine hundred, on my oath!"

"Have you made the offer?"

"Made it? Why, if I set foot on the tip edge of that land I'd have every lean hound in the pack snapping at my heels. As for that young rascal, he'd knock me down if I so much as scented the matter."

He rapped his pipe sharply on the wood of his chair and a little pile of ashes settled upon the floor. With a laugh, the other waved his hand in protest.

"So you prefer to make the proposition by proxy. My dear sir—I'm not a rubber ball."

"Oh, he won't hurt you. It would spoil the sport to punch anybody's head but mine, you know. Come, now, isn't it a fair offer I'm making?"

"It appears so, certainly—and I really do not see why he should wish to hold the place. It isn't worth much, I fancy, to anybody but the owner of the Hall, and with the three thousand clear he could probably get a much better one at a little distance—with the additional value of putting a few square miles between himself and you—whom, I may presume, he doesn't love."

"Oh, you may presume he hates me if you'll only work it," snorted Fletcher. "Go over thar boldly—no slinking, mind you—to-morrow morning, and talk them into reason. Lord, man, you ought to be able to do it—don't you know Greek?"

Carraway nodded. "Not that it ever availed me much in an argument," he confessed frankly.

"It's a good thing to stop a mouth with, anyway. Thar's many and many a time, I tell you, I've lost a bargain for the lack of a few rags of Latin or Greek. Drag it in; stuff it down 'em; gag thar mouths—it's better than all the swearing under heaven. Why, taking the Lord's name in vain ain't nothing to a line of poetry spurted of a sudden in one of them dead-and-gone languages. It's been done at me, suh, and I know how it works—that's why I've put the boy upstairs on 'em from the start. 'Tain't much matter whether he goes far in his own tongue or not, that's what I said, but dose him well with something his neighbours haven't learnt."

He rose with a lurch, laid his pipe on the mantel, and drew out his big silver watch.

"Great Jehosaphat! it's eleven and after," he exclaimed. "Well, it's time for us to turn in, I reckon, and dream of breakfast. If you'll hold the lamp while I bolt up, I'll show you to your room."

Carraway picked up the lamp, and, cautiously following his host into the darkened hall, waited until he had fastened the night-chains and shot the heavy bolts.

"If you want a drink of water thar's a bucket in the porch," said Fletcher, as he opened the back door and reached out into the moonlight. "Wait thar a second and I'll hand you the dipper."

He stepped out upon the porch, and a moment later Carraway heard a heavy stumble followed by a muttered oath.

"Why, blast the varmints! I've upset the boy's cage of white mice and they're skedaddling about my legs. Here! hold the lamp, will you—I'm squashing a couple of 'em under each of my hands."

Carraway, leaning out with the lamp, which drew a brilliant circle on the porch, saw Fletcher floundering helplessly upon his hands and knees in the midst of the fleeing family of mice.

"They're a plagued mess of beasts, that's what they are," he exclaimed, "but the little lad sets a heap of store by 'em, and when he comes down tomorrow he'll find that I got some of 'em back, anyway."

He fastened the cage and placed it carefully beneath the bench.
Then, closing and bolting the door, he took the lamp from
Carraway and motioned him up the dusky staircase to the spare
chamber at the top.

CHAPTER V. The Wreck of the Blakes

When Christopher left Blake Hall, he swung vigorously in the twilight across the newly ploughed fields, until, at the end of a few minutes' walk, he reached the sunken road that branched off by the abandoned ice-pond. Here the bullfrogs were still croaking hoarsely, and far away over the gray-green rushes a dim moon was mounting the steep slope of bluish sky.

The air was fresh with the scent of the upturned earth, and the closing day refined into a tranquil beauty; but the young man, as he passed briskly, did not so much as draw a lengthened breath, and when presently the cry of a whip-poor-will floated from the old rail fence, he fell into a whistling mockery of the plaintive notes. The dogs at his heels started a rabbit once from the close cover of the underbrush, and he called them to order in a sharp, peremptory tone. Not until he reached the long, whitewashed gate opening before the frame house of the former overseers did he break the easy swing of his accustomed stride.

The house, a common country dwelling of the sort used by the poorer class of farmers, lost something of its angularity beneath the moonlight, and even the half-dried garments, spread after the day's washing on the bent old rose-bushes, shone in soft white patches amid the grass, which looked thick and fine under the heavy dew. In one corner of the yard there was a spreading peach-tree, on which the shriveled little peaches ripened out of season, and against the narrow porch sprawled a gray and crippled aspen, where a flock of turkeys had settled to roost along its twisted boughs.

In one of the lower rooms a lamp was burning, and as Christopher crunched heavily along the pebbled path, a woman with a piece of sewing in her hand came into the hall and spoke his name.

"Christopher, you are late."

Her voice was deep and musical, with a richness of volume which raised deluding hopes of an impassioned beauty in the speaker—who, as she crossed the illumined square of the window-frame, showed as a tall, thin woman of forty years, with squinting eyes, and a face whose misshapen features stood out like the hasty drawing for a grotesque. When she reached him Christopher turned from the porch, and they walked together slowly out into the moonlight, passing under the aspen where the turkeys stirred and fluttered in their sleep.

"Has her cat come home, Cynthia?" were the young man's first anxious words.

"About sunset. Uncle Boaz found her over at Aunt Daphne's, hunting mice under the joists. Mother had fretted terribly over the loss."

"Is she easier now?"

"Much more so, but she still asks for the port. We pretend that Uncle Boaz has mislaid the key of the wine-cellar. She upbraided him, and he bore it so patiently, poor old soul!"

Christopher quickly reached into the deep pocket of his overalls and drew out the scanty wages of his last three days' labour.

"Send this by somebody down to Tompkins," he said, "and get the wine he ordered. He refuses to sell on credit any longer, so I had to find the money."

She looked up, startled.

"Oh, Christopher, you have worked for Fletcher?"

Tears shone in her eyes and her mouth quivered. "Oh, Christopher!" she repeated, and the emotional quality in her voice rang strong and true. He fell back, angered, while the hand she had stretched out dropped limply to her side.

"For God's sake, don't snivel," he retorted harshly. "Send the money and give her the wine, but dole it out like a miser, for where the next will come from is more than I can tell."

"The pay for my sewing is due in three days," said Cynthia, raising her roughened hand on which the needle-scars showed even in the moonlight. "Mother has worried so to-day that I couldn't work except at odd moments, but I can easily manage to sit up to-night and get it done. She thinks I'm embroidering an ottoman, you see, and this evening she asked to feel the silks."

He uttered a savage exclamation.

"Oh, I gave her some ravellings from an old tidy," she hastened to assure him. "She played with them awhile and knew no better, as I told her the colours one by one. Afterward she planned all kinds of samplers and fire-screens that I might work. Her own knitting has wearied her of late, so we haven't been obliged to buy the yarn."

"She doesn't suspect, you think?"

Cynthia shook her head. "After fifteen years of deception there's no danger of my telling the truth to-day. I only wish I could," she added, with that patient dignity which is the outward expression of complete renouncement. When she lifted her tragic face the tears on her cheeks softened the painful hollows, as the moonbeams, playing over her gown of patched and faded silk, revived for a moment the freshness of its discoloured flowers.

"The truth would be the death of her," said the young man, in a bitter passion of anxiety. "Tell her that Fletcher owns the Hall, and that for fifteen years she has lived, blind and paralysed, in the overseer's house! Why, I'd rather stick a knife into her heart myself!"

"Her terrible pride would kill her—yes, you're right. We'll keep it up to the end at any cost."

He turned to her with a sudden terror in his face. "She isn't worse, is she?"

"Worse? Oh, no; I only meant the cost to us, the cost of never speaking the truth within the house."

"Well, I'm not afraid of lying, God knows," he answered, in the tone of one from whom a burden has been removed. "I'm only wondering how much longer I'll be able to afford the luxury."

"But we're no worse off than usual, that's one comfort. Mother is quite happy now since Beulah has been found, and the only added worry is that Aunt Dinah is laid up in her cabin and we've had to send her soup. Uncle Isam has come to see you, by the way. I believe he wants you to give him some advice about his little hut up in the woods, and to look up his birth in the servants' age-book, too. He lives five miles away, you know, and works across the river at Farrar's Mills."

"Uncle Isam!" exclaimed Christopher, wonderingly; "why, what do I know about the man? I haven't laid eyes on him for the last ten years."

"But he wants help now, so of course he's come to you, and as he's walked all the distance—equally of course—he'll stay to supper. Mother has her young chicken, and there's bacon and cornbread for the rest of us, so I hope the poor man won't go back hungry. Ever since Aunt Polly's chimney blew down she has had to fry the middling in the kitchen, and mother complains so of the smell. She can't understand why we have it three times a day, and when I told her that Uncle Tucker acquired the habit in the army, she remarked that it was very inconsiderate of him to insist upon gratifying so extraordinary a taste."

Christopher laughed shortly.

"Well, it's a muck of a world," he declared cheerfully, taking off his coarse harvest hat and running his hand through his clustering fair hair. In the mellow light the almost brutal strength of his jaw was softened, and his sunburned face paled to the beauty of some ancient ivory carving. Cynthia, gazing up at him, caught her breath with a sob.

"How big you are, and strong! How fit for any life in the world but this!"

"Don't whimper," he responded roughly, adding, after a moment, "Precious fit for anything but the stable or the tobacco field! Why, I couldn't so much as write a decently spelled letter to save my soul. A darky asked me yesterday to read a postbill for him down at the store, and I had to skip a big word in the first line."

He made his confession defiantly, with a certain boorish pride in his ignorance and his degradation.

"My dear, my dear, I wanted to teach you—I will teach you now.
We will read together."

"And let mother and Uncle Tucker plough the field, and plant the crop, and cut the wood. No, it won't answer; your learning would do me no good, and I don't want it—I told you that when you first took me from my study and put me to do all the chores upon the place."

"I take you! Oh, Christopher, what could we do? Uncle Tucker was a hopeless cripple, there wasn't a servant strong enough to spade the garden, and there were only Lila and you and I."

"And I was ten. Well, I'm not blaming you, and I've done what I was forced to—but keep your confounded books out of my sight, that's all I ask. Is that mother calling?"

Cynthia bent her ear. "I thought Lila was with her, but I'll go at once. Be sure to change your clothes, dear, before she touches you."

"Hadn't I better chop a little kindling-wood before supper?"

"No—no, not to-night. Go and dress, while I send Uncle Boaz for the wine."

She entered the house with a hurried step, and Christopher, after an instant's hesitation, passed to the back, and, taking off his clumsy boots, crept softly up the creaking staircase to his little garret room in the loft.

Ten minutes later he came down again, wearing a decent suit of country-made clothes, with the dust washed from his face, and his hair smoothly brushed across his forehead. In the front hall he took a white rosebud from a little vase of Bohemian glass and pinned it carefully in the lapel of his coat. Then, before entering, he stood for a moment silent upon the threshold of the lamplighted room.

In a massive Elizabethan chair of blackened oak a stately old lady was sitting straight and stiff, with her useless legs stretched out upon an elaborately embroidered ottoman. She wore a dress of rich black brocade, made very full in the skirt, and sleeves after an earlier fashion, and her beautiful snow-white hair was piled over a high cushion and ornamented by a cap of fine thread lace. In her face, which she turned at the first footstep with a pitiable, blind look, there were the faint traces of a proud, though almost extinguished, beauty—traces which were visible in the impetuous flash of her sightless eyes, in the noble arch of her brows, and in the transparent quality of her now yellowed skin, which still kept the look of rare porcelain held against the sunlight. On a dainty, rose-decked tray beside her chair there were the half of a broiled chicken, a thin glass of port, and a plate of buttered waffles; and near her high footstool a big yellow cat was busily lapping a saucer of new milk.

As Christopher went up to her, she stretched out her hand and touched his face with her sensitive fingers. "Oh, if I could only see you," she said, a little peevishly. "It is twenty years since I looked at you, and now you are taller than your father was, you say. I can feel that your hair is light, like his and like Lila's, too, since you are twins."

A pretty, fragile woman, who was wrapping a shawl about the old lady's feet, rose to her full height and passed behind the Elizabethan chair." Just a shade lighter than mine, mother," she responded; "the sun makes a difference, you know; he is in the sun so much without a hat." As she stood with her delicate hands clasped above the fancifully carved grotesques upon the chair-back, her beauty shone like a lamp against the smoke-stained walls.

"Ah, if you could but have seen his father when he was young, Lila," sighed her mother, falling into one of the easy reveries of old age. "I met him at a fancy ball, you know, where he went as Achilles in full Grecian dress. Oh! the sight he was, my dear, one of the few fair men among us, and taller even than old Colonel Fitzhugh, who was considered one of the finest figures of his time. That was a wild night for me, Christopher, as I've told you often before—it was love at first sight on both sides, and so marked were your father's attentions that they were the talk of the ball. Edward Morris—the greatest wit of his day, you know—remarked at supper that the weak point of Achilles was proved at last to be not his heel, but his heart."

She laughed with pleasure at the memory, and returned in a half-hearted fashion to her plate of buttered waffles. "Have you been riding again, Christopher?" she asked after a moment, as if remembering a grievance. "I haven't had so much as a word from you to-day, but when one is chained to a chair like this it is useless to ask even to be thought of amid your pleasures."

"I always think of you, mother."

"Well, I'm glad to hear it, my dear, though I'm sure I should never imagine that you do. Have you heard, by the way, that Boaz lost the key of the winecellar, and that I had to go two whole days without my port? I declare, he is getting so careless that I'm afraid we'll have to put another butler over him."

"Lawd, ole miss, you ain' gwine do dat, is you?" anxiously questioned Uncle Boaz as he filled her glass.

She lifted the wine to her lips, her stern face softening. Like many a high-spirited woman doomed to perpetual inaction, her dominion over her servants had grown to represent the larger share of life.

"Then be more careful in future, Boaz," she cautioned. "Tell me, Lila, what has become of Nathan, the son of Phyllis? He used to be a very bright little darkey twenty years ago, and I always intended putting him in the dining-room, but things escape me so. His mother, Phyllis, I remember, got some ridiculous idea about freedom in her head, and ran away with the Yankee soldiers before we whipped them."

Lila's face flushed, for since the war Nathan had grown into one of the most respectable of freedmen, but Uncle Boaz, with a glib tongue, started valiantly to her support.

"Go 'way, ole miss; dat ar Natan is de mos' ornery un er de hull bunch," he declared. "Wen he comes inter my dinin'-'oom, out I'se gwine, an' days sho."

The old lady passed a hand slowly across her brow. "I can't remember—I can't remember," she murmured; "but I dare say you're right, Boaz—and that reminds me that this bottle of port is not so good as the last. Have you tried it, Christopher?"

"Not yet, mother. Where did you find it, Uncle Boaz?"

"Hit's des de same, suh," protested Uncle Boaz. "Dey wuz bofe un um layin' right side by side, des like dey 'uz bo'n blood kin, en I done dus' de cobwebs off'n um wid de same duster, dat I is."

"Well, well, that will do. Now go in to supper, children, and send Docia to take my tray. Dear me, I do wish that Tucker could be persuaded to give up that vulgar bacon. I'm not so unreasonable, I hope, as to expect a man to make any sacrifices in this world—that's the woman's part, and I've tried to take my share of it—but to conceive of a passion for a thing like bacon—I declare is quite beyond me."

"Come, now, Lucy, don't begin to meddle with my whims," protested the cheerful tones of Tucker, as he entered on his crutches, one of which was strapped to the stump of his right arm. "Allow me my dissipations, my dear, and I'll not interfere with yours."

"Dissipations!" promptly took up the old lady, from the hearth. "Why, if it were such a gentlemanly thing as a dissipation, Tucker, I shouldn't say a word—not a single word. A taste for wine is entirely proper, I'm sure, and even a little intoxication is permissible on occasions—such as christenings, weddings, and Christmas Eve gatherings. Your father used to say, Christopher, that the proof of a gentleman was in the way he held his wine. But to fall a deliberate victim to so low-born a vice as a love of bacon is something that no member of our family has ever done before."

"That's true, Lucy," pleasantly assented Tucker; "but then, you see, no member of our family had ever fought three years for his State—to say nothing of losing a leg and an arm in her service."

His fine face was ploughed with the marks of suffering, but the heartiness had not left his voice, and his smile still shone bright and strong. From a proud position as the straightest shot and the gayest liver of his day, he had been reduced at a single blow to the couch of a hopeless cripple. Poverty had come a little later, but the second shock had only served to steady his nerves from the vibration of the first, and the courage which had drooped within him for a time was revived in the form of a rare and gentle humour. Nothing was so terrible but Tucker could get a laugh out of it, people said—not knowing that since he had learned to smile at his own ghastly failure it was an easy matter to turn the jest on universal joy or woe.

The old lady's humour melted at his words, and she hastened to offer proof of her contrition. "You're perfectly right, brother," she said; "and I know I'm an ungrateful creature, so you needn't take the trouble to tell me. As long as you do me the honour to live beneath my roof, you shall eat the whole hog or none to your heart's content."

Then, as Docia, a large black woman, with brass hoops in her ears, appeared to bear away the supper tray, Mrs. Blake folded her hands and settled herself for a nap upon her cushions, while the yellow cat purred blissfully on her knees.

Beyond the adjoining bedroom, through which Christopher passed, a rude plank platform led to a long, unceiled room which served as kitchen and dining-room in one. Here a cheerful blaze made merry about an ancient crane, on which a coffeeboiler swung slowly back and forth with a bubbling noise. In the red firelight a plain pine table was spread with a scant supper of cornbread and bacon and a cracked Wedgewood pitcher filled with buttermilk. There was no silver; the china consisted of some odd, broken pieces of old willow-ware; and beyond a bunch of damask roses stuck in a quaint glass vase, there was no visible attempt to lighten the effect of extreme poverty. An aged Negress, in a dress of linsey-woolsey which resembled a patchwork quilt, was pouring hot, thin coffee into a row of cups with chipped or missing saucers.

Cynthia was already at the table, and when Christopher came in she served him with an anxious haste like that of a stricken mother. To Tucker and herself the coarse fare was unbearable even after the custom of fifteen years, and time had not lessened the surprise with which they watched the young man's healthful enjoyment of his food. Even Lila, whose glowing face in its nimbus of curls lent an almost festive air to her end of the white pine board, ate with a heartiness which Cynthia, with her outgrown standard for her sex, could not but find a trifle vulgar. The elder sister had been born to a different heritage —to one of restricted views and mincing manners for a woman—and, despite herself, she could but drift aimlessly on the widening current of the times.

"Christopher, will you have some coffee—it is stronger now?" she asked presently, reaching for his emptied cup.

"Dis yer stuff ain' no cawfy," grumbled Aunt Pony, taking the boiler from the crane; "hit ain' nuttin' but dishwater, I don' cyar who done made hit." Then, as the door opened to admit Uncle Isam with a bucket from the spring, she divided her scorn equally between him and the coffee-pot.

"You needn't be a-castin' er you nets into dese yer pains," she observed cynically.

Uncle Isam, a dried old Negro of seventy years, shambled in patiently and placed the bucket carefully upon the stones, to be shrilly scolded by Aunt Polly for spilling a few drops on the floor. "I reckon you is steddyin' ter outdo Marse Noah," she remarked with scorn.

"Howdy, Marse Christopher? Howdy, Marse Tuck?" Uncle Isam inquired politely, as he seated himself in a low chair on the hearth and dropped his clasped hands between his open knees.

Christopher nodded carelessly. "Glad to see you, Isam," Tucker cordially responded. "Times have changed since you used to live over here."

"Days so, suh, dot's so. Times dey's done change, but I ain't—I'se des de same. Dat's de tribble wid dis yer worl'; w'en hit change yo' fortune hit don' look ter changin' yo' skin es well."

"That's true; but you're doing all right, I hope?"

"I dunno, Marse Tuck," replied Uncle Isam, coughing as a sudden spurt of smoke issued from the old stone chimney. "I dunno 'bout dat. Times dey's right peart, but I ain't. De vittles dey's ready ter do dar tu'n, but de belly, hit ain't."

"What—are you sick?" asked Cynthia, with interest, rising from the table.

Uncle Isam sighed. "I'se got a tur'able peskey feelin', Miss Cynthy, days de gospel trufe," he returned. "I dunno whur hit's de lungs er de liver, but one un um done got moughty sassy ter de yuther 'en he done flung de reins right loose. Hit looks pow'ful like dey wuz gwine ter run twel dey bofe drap down daid, so I done come all dis way atter a dose er dem bitters ole miss use ter gin us befo' de wah."

"Well, I never!" said Cynthia, laughing. "I believe he means the brown bitters mother used to make for chills and fever. I'm very sorry, Uncle Isam, but we haven't any. We don't keep it any longer."

Leaning over his gnarled palms, the old man shook his head in sober reverie.

"Dar ain' nuttin' like dem bitters in dese yer days," he reflected sadly, "'caze de smell er dem use ter mos' knock you flat 'fo' you done taste 'em, en all de way ter de belly dey use ter keep a-wukin' fur dey livin'. Lawd! Lawd! I'se done bought de biggest bottle er sto' stuff in de sto', en hit slid right spang down 'fo' I got a grip er de taste er hit."

"I'll tell you how to mix it, " said Cynthia sympathetically.
"It's very easy; I know Aunt Eve can brew it."

"Go 'way, Miss Cynthy; huccome you don' know better'n dat? Dar ain' no Eve. She's done gone."

"Gone! Is she dead?"

"Naw'm, she aint daid dat I knows—she's des gone.

Hit all come along er dem highfalutin' notions days struttin' roun' dese days 'bout prancin' up de chu'ch aisle en bein' mah'ed by de preacher, stedder des totin' all yo' belongin's f'om one cabin ter anurr, en roas'in' yo' ash-cake in de same pile er ashes. You see, me en Eve we hed done 'sperunce mah'age gwine n fifty years, but we ain' nuver 'sperunce de ceremony twel las' watermillion time."

"Why, Uncle Isam, did she leave you because of that? Here, draw up to the table and eat your supper, while I get down the age-book and find your birth."

She reached for a dusty account book on one of the kitchen shelves, and, bringing it to the table, began slowly turning the yellowed leaves. For more than two hundred years the births of all the Blake slaves had been entered in the big volume.

"You des wait, Miss Cynthy, you des wait twel I git dar," remonstrated Uncle Isam, as he stirred his coffee. "I ain' got no use fur dese yer newfangle fashions, dot's wat I tell de chillun w'en dey begin a-pesterin' me ter mah'y Eve—I ain' got no use fur dem no way hit's put—I ain' got no use fur dis yer struttin' up de aisle bus'ness, ner fur dis yer w'arin' er sto'-made shoes, ner fur dis yer leavin' er de hyar unwropped, needer. Hit looks pisonous tickly ter me, days wat I sez, but w'en dey keep up dey naggin' day in en day out, en I carn' git shunt er um, I hop right up en put on my Sunday bes' en go 'long wid 'em ter de chu'ch—me en Eve bofe a-mincin' des like peacocks. 'You des pay de preacher,' days wat I tell 'em, 'en I'se gwine do all de mah'yin' days ter be done'; en w'en de preacher done got thoo wid me en Eve, I stood right up in de chu'ch an axed ef dey wus any udder nigger 'ooman es 'ud like ter do a little mah'yin'? 'Hit's es easy ter mah'y a dozen es ter mah'y one,' I holler out."

"Oh, Uncle Isam! No wonder Aunt Eve was angry. Here we are—'Isam, son of Docia, born August 12, 18—."

"Lawd, Miss Cynthy, 'twan' me dat mek Eve mad—twuz de preacher, 'caze atter we got back ter de cabin en eat de watermillion ter de rin', she up en tied her bonnet on tight es a chestnut burr en made right fur de do'. De preacher done tote 'er, she sez, dat Eve 'uz in subjection ter her husban', en she'd let 'im see she warn' gwine be subjected unner no man, she warn't. 'Fo' de Lawd, Miss Cynthy, dat ar Eve sutney wuz a high-sperited 'ooman!"

"But, Uncle Isam, it was so silly. Why, she'd been married to you already for a lifetime."

"Dat's so, Miss Cynthy, dat's so, 'caze 'twuz dem ar wuds dat rile 'er mos'. She 'low she done been in subjection fur gwine on fifty years widout knowin' hit."

He finished his coffee at a gulp and leaned back in his chair.

"En now des fem me hyear how ole I is," he wound up sorrowfully.

"The twelfth of August, 18— (that's the date of your birth), makes you—let me see—you'll be seventy years old next summer. There, now, since you've found out what you wanted, you'd better spend the night with Uncle Boaz."

"Thanky, ma'am, but I mus' be gwine back agin," responded Uncle
Isam, shuffling to his feet, "en ef you don' min', Marse
Christopher, I'd like a wud wid you outside de do'."

Laughing, Christopher rose from his chair and, with a patriarchal dignity of manner, followed the old man into the moonlight.

CHAPTER VI. Carraway Plays Courtier

At twelve o'clock the next day, Carraway, walking in the June brightness along the road to the Blake cottage, came suddenly, at the bend of the old icepond, upon Maria Fletcher returning from a morning ride. The glow of summer was in her eyes, and though her face was still pale, she seemed to him a different creature from the grave, repressed girl of the night before. He noticed at once that she sat her horse superbly, and in her long black habit all the sinuous lines of her figure moved in rhythm with the rapid pace.

As she neared him, and apparently before she had noticed his approach, he saw her draw rein quickly, and, screened by the overhanging boughs of a blossoming chestnut, send her glance like a hooded falcon across the neighbouring field. Following the aim of her look, he saw Christopher Blake walking idly among the heavy furrows, watching, with the interest of a born agriculturist, the busy transplanting of Fletcher's crop. He still wore his jean clothes, which, hanging loosely upon his impressive figure, blended harmoniously with the dull-purple tones of the upturned soil. Beyond him there was a background of distant wood, still young in leaf, and his bared head, with the strong, sunburned line of his profile, stood out as distinctly as a portrait done in early Roman gold.

That Maria had seen in him some higher possibility than that of a field labourer was soon evident to Carraway, for her horse was still standing on the slight incline, and as he reached her side she turned with a frank question on her lips.

"Is that one of the labourers—the young giant by the fence?"

"Well, I dare say he labours, if that's what you mean. He's young
Blake, you know."

"Young Blake?" She bent her brows, and it was clear that the name suggested only a trivial recollection to her mind. "There used to be some Blake children in the old overseer's house—is this one of them."

"Possibly; they live in the overseer's house."

She leaned over, fastening her heavy gauntlet. "They wouldn't play with me, I remember; I couldn't understand why. Once I carried my dolls over to their yard, and the boy set a pack of hounds on me. I screamed so that an old Negro ran out and drove them off, and all the time the boy stood by, laughing and calling me names. Is that he, do you think?"

"I dare say. It sounds like him."

"Is he so cruel?" she asked a little wistfully.

"I don't know about that—but he doesn't like your people. Your grandfather had some trouble with him a long time ago."

"And he wanted to punish me?—how cowardly."

"It does sound rather savage, but it isn't an ordinary case, you know. He's the kind of person to curse 'root and branch,' from all I hear, in the good old Biblical fashion."

"Oh, well, he's certainly very large, isn't he?"

"He's superb," said Carraway, with conviction.

"At a distance—so is that great pine over there," she lifted her whip and pointed across the field; then as Carraway made no answer, she smiled slightly and rode rapidly toward the Hall.

For a few minutes the lawyer stood where she had left him, watching in puzzled thought her swaying figure on the handsome horse. The girl fretted him, and yet he felt that he liked her almost in spite of himself—liked something fine and fearless he found in her dark eyes; liked, too, even while he sneered, her peculiar grace of manner. There was the making of a woman in her after all, he told himself, as he turned into the sunken road, where he saw Christopher already moving homeward. He had meant to catch up with him and join company on the way, but the young man covered ground so quickly with his great strides that at last Carraway, losing sight of him entirely, resigned himself to going leisurely about his errand.

When, a little later, he opened the unhinged whitewashed gate before the cottage, the place, as he found it, seemed to be tenanted solely by a family of young turkeys scratching beneath the damask rose-bushes in the yard. From a rear chimney a dark streak of smoke was rising, but the front of the house gave no outward sign of life, and as there came no answer to his insistent knocks he at last ventured to open the door and pass into the narrow hall. From the first room on the right a voice spoke at his entrance, and following the sound he found himself face to face with Mrs. Blake in her massive Elizabethan chair.

"There is a stranger in the room," she said rigidly, turning her sightless eyes; "speak at once."

"I beg pardon most humbly for my intrusion," replied Carraway, conscious of stammering like an offending schoolboy, "but as no one answered my knock, I committed the indiscretion of opening a closed door."

Awed as much by the stricken pallor of her appearance as by the inappropriate grandeur of her black brocade and her thread lace cap, he advanced slowly and stood awaiting his dismissal.

"What door?" she demanded sharply, much to his surprise.

"Yours, madam."

"Not answer your knock?" she pursued, with indignation. "So that was the noise I heard, and no wonder that you entered. Why, what is the matter with the place? Where are the servants?"

He humbly replied that he had seen none, to be taken up with her accustomed quickness of touch.

"Seen none! Why, there are three hundred of them, sir. Well, well, this is really too much. I shall put a butler over Boaz this very day."

For an instant Carraway felt strangely tempted to turn and run as fast as he could along the sunken road—remembering, as he struggled with the impulse, that he had once been caught at the age of ten and whipped for stealing apples. Recovering with an effort his sense of dignity, he offered the suggestion that Boaz, instead of being seriously in fault, might merely have been engaged in useful occupations "somewhere at the back."

"What on earth can he have to do at the back, sir?" inquired the irrepressible old lady; "but since you were so kind as to overlook our inhospitable reception, will you not be equally good and tell me your name?"

"I fear it won't enlighten you much," replied the lawyer modestly, "but my name happens to be Guy Carraway."

"Guy—Guy Carraway," repeated Mrs. Blake, as if weighing each separate letter in some remote social scales. " I've known many a Guy in my day—and that part, at least, of your name is quite familiar. There was Guy Nelson, and Guy Blair, and Guy Marshall, the greatest beau of his time—but I don't think I ever had the pleasure of meeting a Carraway before."

"That is more than probable, ma'am, but I have the advantage of you, since, as a child, I was once taken out upon the street corner merely to see you go by on your way to a fancy ball, where you appeared as Diana."

Mrs. Blake yielded gracefully to the skilful thrust.

"Ah, I was Lucy Corbin then," she sighed. "You find few traces of her in me now, sir."

"Unfortunately, your mirror cannot speak for me."

She shook her head.

"You're a flatterer—a sad flatterer, I see," she returned, a little wistfully; "but it does no harm, as I tell my son, to flatter the old. It is well to strew the passage to the grave with flowers."

"How well I remember that day, " said Carraway, speaking softly. "There was a crowd about the door, waiting to see you come out, and a carpenter lifted me upon his shoulder. Your hair was as black as night, and there was a circle round your head."

"A silver fillet," she corrected, with a smile in which there was a gentle archness.

"A fillet, yes; and you carried a bow and a quiver full of arrows. I declare, it seems but yesterday."

"It was more than fifty years ago," murmured the old lady. Well, well, I've had my day, sir, and it was a merry one. I am almost seventy years old, I'm half dead, and stone blind into the bargain, but I can say to you that this is a cheerful world in spite of the darkness in which I linger on. I'd take it over again and gladly any day—the pleasure and the pain, the light and the darkness. Why, I sometimes think that my present blindness was given me in order that I might view the past more clearly. There's not a ball of my youth, nor a face I knew, nor even a dress I wore, that I don't see more distinctly every day. The present is a very little part of life, sir; it's the past in which we store our treasures."

"You're right, you're right," replied Carraway, drawing his chair nearer the embroidered ottoman and leaning over to stroke the yellow cat; "and I'm glad to hear so cheerful a philosophy from your lips."

"It is based on a cheerful experience—I've been as you see me now only twenty years."

Only twenty years! He looked mutely round the soiled whitewashed walls, where hung a noble gathering of Blake portraits in massive old gilt frames. Among them he saw the remembered face of Lucy Corbin herself, painted under a rose-garland held by smiling Loves.

"Life has its trials, of course, " pursued Mrs. Blake, as if speaking to herself. "I can't look out upon the June flowers, you know, and though the pink crape-myrtle at my window is in full bloom I cannot see it."

Following her gesture, Carraway glanced out into the little yard; no myrtle was there, but he remembered vaguely that he had seen one in blossom at the Hall.

"You keep flowers about you, though," he said, alluding to the scattered vases of June roses.

"Not my crape-myrtle. I planted it myself when I first came home with Mr. Blake, and I have never allowed so much as a spray of it to be plucked."

Forgetting his presence, she lapsed for a time into one of the pathetic day-dreams of old age. Then recalling herself suddenly, her tone took on a sprightliness like that of youth.

"It's not often that we have the pleasure of entertaining a stranger in our out-of-the-way house, sir so may I ask where you are staying—or perhaps you will do us the honour to sleep beneath our roof. It has had the privilege of sheltering General Washington."

"You are very kind," replied Carraway, with a gratitude that was from his heart, "but to tell the truth, I feel that I am sailing under false colours. The real object of my visit is to ask a business interview with your son. I bring what seems to me a very fair offer for the place."

Grasping the carved arms of her chair, Mrs. Blake turned the wonder in her blind eyes upon him.

"An offer for the place! Why, you must be dreaming, sir! A Blake owned it more than a hundred years before the Revolution."

At the instant, understanding broke upon Carraway like a thundercloud, and as he rose from his seat it seemed to him that he had missed by a single step the yawning gulf before him. Blind terror gripped him for the moment, and when his brain steadied he looked up to meet, from the threshold of the adjoining room, the enraged flash of Christopher's eyes. So tempestuous was the glance that Carraway, impulsively falling back, squared himself to receive a physical blow; but the young man, without so much as the expected oath, came in quietly and took his stand behind the Elizabethan chair.

"Why, what a joke, mother," he said, laughing; "he means the old Weatherby farm, of course. The one I wanted to sell last year, you know."

"I thought you'd sold it to the Weatherbys, Christopher."

"Not a bit of it—they backed out at the last; but don't begin to bother your head about such things; they aren't worth it. And now, sir," he turned upon Carraway, "since your business is with me, perhaps you will have the goodness to step outside."

With the feeling that he was asked out for a beating, Carraway turned for a farewell with Mrs. Blake, but the imperious old lady was not to be so lightly defrauded of a listener.

"Business may come later, my son," she said, detaining them by a gesture of her heavily ringed hand. "After dinner you may take Mr. Carraway with you into the library and discuss your affairs over a bottle of burgundy, as was your grandfather's custom before you; meanwhile, he and I will resume our very pleasant talk which you interrupted. He remembers seeing me in the old days when we were all in the United States, my dear."

Christopher's brow grew black, and he threw a sharp and malignant glance of sullen suspicion at Carraway, who summoned to meet it his most frank and open look.

"I saw your mother in the height of her fame," he said, smiling, "so I may count myself one of her oldest admirers, I believe. You may assure yourself," he added softly, "that I have her welfare very decidedly at heart."

At this Christopher smiled back at him, and there was something of the June brightness in his look.

"Well, take care, sir," he answered, and went out, closing the door carefully behind him, while Carraway applied himself to a determined entertaining of Mrs. Blake.

To accomplish this he found that he had only to leave her free, guiding her thoughts with his lightest touch into newer channels. The talk had grown merrier now, and he soon discovered that she possessed a sharpened wit as well as a ready tongue. From subject to subject she passed with amazing swiftness, bearing down upon her favourite themes with the delightful audacity of the talker who is born, not made. She spoke of her own youth, of historic flirtations in the early twenties, of great beaux she had known, and of famous recipes that had been handed down for generations. Everywhere he felt her wonderful keenness of perception, that intuitive understanding of men and manners which had kept her for so long the reigning belle among her younger rivals.

As she went on he found that her world was as different from his own as if she dwelt upon some undiscovered planet—a world peopled with shades and governed by an ideal group of abstract laws. She lived upon lies, he saw, and thrived upon the sweetness she extracted from them. For her the Confederacy had never fallen, the quiet of her dreamland had been disturbed by no invading army, and the three hundred slaves, who had in reality scattered like chaff before the wind, she still saw in her cheerful visions tilling her familiar fields. It was as if she had fallen asleep with the great blow that bad wrecked her body, and had dreamed on steadily throughout the years. Of real changes she was as ignorant as a new-born child. Events had shaken the world to its centre, and she, by her obscure hearth, had not felt so much as a sympathetic tremor. In her memory there was no Appomattox, news of the death of Lincoln had never reached her ears, and president had peacefully succeeded president in the secure Confederacy in which she lived. Wonderful as it all was, to Carraway the most wonderful thing was the intricate tissue of lies woven around her chair. Lies—lies—there had been nothing but lies spoken within her hearing for twenty years.

CHAPTER VII. In Which a Stand is Made

Dim wonder was still upon him when Docia appeared bearing her mistress's dinner-tray, and a moment later Cynthia came in and paused uncertainly near the threshold.

"Do you wish anything, mother?"

"Only to present Mr. Carraway, my child. He will be with us at dinner."

Cynthia came forward smiling and held out her hand with the cordial hospitality which she had inherited with the family portraits and the good old name. She wore this morning a dress of cheap black calico, shrunken from many washings, and beneath the scant sleeves Carraway saw her thin red wrists, which looked as if they had been soaking in harsh soapsuds. Except for a certain ease of manner which she had not lost in the drudgery of her life, she might have been sister to the toilworn slattern he had noticed in one of the hovels across the country.

"We shall be very glad to have you," she said, with quiet dignity.

"It is ready now, I think."

"Be sure to make him try the port, Cynthia," called Mrs. Blake, as Carraway followed the daughter across the threshold.

In the kitchen they found Tucker and Lila and a strange young man in overalls, who was introduced as "one of the Weatherbys who live just up the road." He was evidently one of their plainer neighbours for Carraway detected a constraint in Cynthia's manner which Lila did not appear to share. The girl, dressed daintily in a faded muslin, with an organdy kerchief crossed over her swelling bosom, flashed upon Carraway's delighted vision like one of the maidens hanging, gilt-framed, in the old lady's parlour. That she was the particular pride of the family—the one luxury they allowed themselves besides their costly mother—the lawyer realised upon the instant. Her small white hands were unsoiled by any work, and her beautiful, kindly face had none of the nervous dread which seemed always lying behind Cynthia's tired eyes. With the high devotion of a martyr, the elder sister must have offered herself a willing sacrifice, winning for the younger an existence which, despite its gray monotony, showed fairly rose-coloured in comparison with her own. She herself had sunk to the level of a servant, but through it all Lila had remained "the lady," preserving an equable loveliness to which Jim Weatherby hardly dared lift his wistful gaze.

As for the young man himself, he had a blithe, open look which Carraway found singularly attractive, the kind of look it warms one's heart to meet in the long road on a winter's day. Leaning idly against the lintel of the door, and fingering a bright axe which he was apparently anxious that they should retain, he presented a pleasant enough picture to the attentive eyes within the kitchen.

"You'd as well keep this axe as long as you want it," he protested earnestly. " It's an old one, anyway, that I sharpened when you asked for it, and we've another at home; that's all we need."

"It's very kind of you, Jim, but ours is mended now," replied
Cynthia, a trifle stiffly.

"If we need one again, we'll certainly borrow yours, "added Lila, smiling as she looked up from the glasses she was filling with fresh buttermilk.

"Sit down, Jim, and have dinner with us; there's no hurry," urged Tucker hospitably, with a genial wave toward the meagerly spread table. "Jim's a great fellow, Mr. Carraway; you ought to know him. He can manage anything from a Sunday-school to the digging of a well. I've always said that if he'd had charge of the children of Israel's journey to the promised land he'd have had them there, flesh-pots and all, before the week was up."

"I can see he is a useful neighbour," observed Carraway, glancing at the axe.

"Well, I'm glad I come handy, " replied Jim in his hearty way; "and are you sure you don't want me to split up that big oak log at the woodpile? I can do it in a twinkling."

Cynthia declined his knightly offer, to be overruled again by
Lila's smiling lips.

"Christopher will have to do it when he comes in, " she said; "poor Christopher, he never has a single moment of his own."

Jim Weatherby looked at her eagerly, his blue eyes full of sparkle. "Why, I can do it in no time," he declared, shouldering his axe, and a moment afterward they heard his merry strokes from the woodpile.

"Are you interested in tobacco, Mr. Carraway?" inquired Tucker, as they seated themselves at the pine table without so much as an apology for the coarseness of the fare or an allusion to their fallen fortunes. "If so, you've struck us at the time when every man about here is setting out his next winter's chew. Sol Peterkin, by the way, has planted every square inch of his land in tobacco, and when I asked him what market he expected to send it to he answered that he only raised a little for his own use."

"Is that the Peterkin who has the pretty daughter?" asked Cynthia, slicing a piece of bacon. "May I help you to turnip salad, Mr. Carraway?" Uncle Boaz, hobbling with rheumatism, held out a quaint old tray of inlaid woods; and the lawyer, as he placed his plate upon it, heaved a sigh of gratitude for the utter absence of vulgarity. He could fancy dear old Miss Saidie puffing apologies over the fat bacon, and Fletcher profanely deploring the sloppy coffee.

"The half-grown girl with the bunch of flaxen curls tied with a blue ribbon?" returned Tucker, while Lila cut up his food as if he were a child. "Yes, that's Molly Peterkin, though it's hard to believe she's any kin to Sol. I shouldn't wonder if she turned into a bouncing beauty a few years further on."

"It was her father, then, that I walked over with from the cross-roads," said Carraway. "He struck me as a shrewd man of his sort."

"Oh, he's shrewd enough," rejoined Tucker, "and the proof of it is that he's outlived three wives and is likely to outlive a fourth. I met him in the road yesterday, and he told me that he had just been off again to get married. 'Good luck to you this time, Sol', said I. 'Wal, it ought to be, sir,' said he, 'seeing as marrying has got to be so costly in these days. Why, my first wife didn't come to more than ten dollars, counting the stovepipe hat and all, and this last one's mounted up to 'most a hundred.' 'Try and take good care of her, then,' I cautioned; "they come too high to throw away." "That's true, sir," he answered, with a sorrowful shake of his head. "But the trouble is that as the price goes up the quality gets poorer. My first one lasted near on to thirty years, and did all the chores about the house, to say nothing of the hog-pen; and if you'll believe me, sir, the one before this stuck at the hog-feeding on her wedding day, and then wore out before twelve months were up.'"

He finished with his humorous chuckle and lifted his fork skilfully in his left hand.

"I dare say he overvalues himself as a husband," remarked Carraway, joining in the laugh, "but he has at least the merit of being loyal to your family."

"Well, I believe he has; but then, he doesn't like new folks or new things, I reckon. There's a saying that his hatred of changes keeps him from ever changing his clothes."

Christopher came in at the moment, and with a slight bow to
Carraway, slipped into his place.

"What's Jim Weatherby chopping up that log for?" he asked, glancing in the direction of the ringing strokes.

Cynthia looked at him almost grimly, and there was a contraction of the muscles about her determined mouth.

"Ask Lila," she responded quietly. As Christopher's questioning gaze turned to her, Lila flushed rose-pink and played nervously with the breadcrumbs on the table.

"He said he had nothing else to do," she answered, with an effort, "and he knew you were so busy—that was all."

"Well, he's a first rate fellow," commented Christopher, as he reached for the pitcher of buttermilk, "but I don't see what makes him so anxious to do my work."

"Oh, that's Jim's way, you know," put in Tucker with his offhand kindliness. "He's the sort of old maid who would undertake to straighten the wilderness if he could get the job. Why, I actually found him once chopping off dead boughs in the woods, and when I laughed he excused himself by saying that he couldn't bear to see trees look so scraggy."

As he talked, his pleasant pale blue eyes twinkled with humour, and his full double chin shook over his shirt of common calico. He had grown very large from his long inaction, and it was with a perceptible effort that he moved himself upon his slender crutches. Yet despite his maimed and suffering body he was dressed with a scrupulous neatness which was almost like an air of elegance. As he chatted on easily, Carraway forgot, in listening to him, the harrowing details in the midst of which he sat—forgot the overheated, smoky kitchen, the common pine table with its broken china, and the sullen young savage whom he faced.

For Christopher was eating his dinner hurriedly, staring at his plate in a moodiness which he did not take the trouble to conceal. With all the youthful beauty of his face, there was a boorishness in his ill-humour which in a less commanding figure would have been repellent—an evident pride in the sincerity of the scowl upon his brow. When his meal was over he rose with a muttered excuse and went out into the yard, where a few minutes afterward Carraway was bold enough to follow him.

The afternoon was golden with sunshine, and every green leaf on the trees seemed to stand out clearly against the bright blue sky. In the rear of the house there was a lack of the careful cleanliness he had noticed at the front, and rotting chips from the woodpile strewed the short grass before the door, where a clump of riotous ailanthus shoots was waging a desperate battle for existence. Beside the sunken wooden step a bare brown patch showed where the daily splashes of hot soapsuds had stripped the ground of even the modest covering that it wore. Within a stone's throw of the threshold the half of a broken wheelbarrow, white with mould, was fast crumbling into earth, and a little farther off stood a disorderly group of chicken coops before which lay a couple of dead nestlings. On the soaking plank ledge around the well-brink, where fresh water was slopping from the overturned bucket, several bedraggled ducks were paddling with evident enjoyment. The one pleasant sight about the place was the sturdy figure of Jim Weatherby, still at work upon the giant body of a dead oak tree.

When Carraway came out, Christopher was feeding a pack of hounds from a tin pan of coarse corn bread, and to the lawyer's surprise he was speaking to them in a tone that sounded almost jocular. Though born of a cringing breed, the dogs looked contented and well fed, and among them Carraway recognised his friend Spy, who had followed at the heels of Uncle Boaz.

"Here, Miser, this is yours," the young man was saying. "There, you needn't turn up your nose; it's as big as Blister's. Down, Spy, I tell you; you've had twice your share; you think because you're the best looking you're to be the best fed, too."

As Carraway left the steps the dogs made an angry rush at him, to be promptly checked by Christopher.

"Back, you fools; back, I say. You'd better be careful how you walk about here, sir," he added; "they'd bite as soon as not—all of them except Spy.

"Good fellow, Spy," returned Carraway, a little nervously, and the hound came fawning to his feet. "I assure you I have no intention of treading upon their preserves," he hastened to explain; "but I should like a word with you, and this seems to be the only opportunity I'll have, as I return to town to-morrow."

Christopher threw the remaining pieces of corn bread into the wriggling pack, set the pan in the doorway, and wiped his hands carelessly upon his overalls.

"Well, I don't see what you've got to say to me," he replied, walking rapidly in the direction of the well, where he waited for the other to join him.

"It's about the place, of course," returned the lawyer, with an attempt to shatter the awkward rustic reserve. "I understand that it has passed into your possession."

The young man nodded, and, drawing out his clasp-knife, fell to whittling a splinter which he had broken from the well-brink.

"In that case," pursued Carraway, feeling as if he were dashing his head against a wall, "I shall address myself to you in the briefest terms. The place, I suppose, as it stands, is not worth much to-day. Even good land is cheap, and this is poor."

Again Christopher nodded, intent upon his whittling. "I reckon it wouldn't bring more than nine hundred," he responded coolly.

"Then my position is easy, for I am sure you will consider favourably the chance to sell at treble its actual value. I am authorised to offer you three thousand dollars for the farm."

For a moment Christopher stared at him in silence, then, "What in the devil do you want with it?" he demanded.

"I am not acting for myself in the matter," returned the lawyer, after a short hesitation. "The offer is made through me by another. That it is to your advantage to accept it is my honest conviction."

Christopher tossed the bit of wood at a bedraggled drake that waddled off, quacking angrily.

"Then it's Fletcher behind you," he said in the same cool tones.

"It seems to me that is neither here nor there. Naturally Mr. Fletcher is very anxious to secure the land. As it stands, it is a serious inconvenience to him, of course."

Laughing, Christopher snapped the blade of his knife.

"Well, you may tell him from me," he retorted, "that just as long as it is 'a serious inconvenience to him' it shall stand as it is. Why, man, if Fletcher wanted that broken wheelbarrow enough to offer me three thousand dollars for it, I wouldn't let him have it. The only thing I'd leave him free to take, if I could help it, is the straight road to damnation!"

His voice, for all the laughter, sounded brutal, and Carraway, gazing at him in wonder, saw his face grow suddenly lustful like that of an evil deity. The beauty was still there, blackened and distorted, a beauty that he felt to be more sinister than ugliness. The lawyer was in the presence of a great naked passion, and involuntarily he lowered his eyes.

"I don't think he understands your attitude," he said quietly; "it seems to him—and to me also, I honestly affirm—that you would reap an advantage as decided as his own."

"Nothing is to my advantage, I tell you, that isn't harm to him.
He knows it if he isn't as big a fool as he is a rascal."

"Then I may presume that you are entirely convinced in your own mind that you have a just cause for the stand you take?"

"Cause!" the word rapped out like an oath. "He stole my home, I tell you; he stole every inch of land I owned, and every penny. Where did he get the money to buy the place—he a slave-overseer? Where did he get it, I ask, unless he had been stealing for twenty years?"

"It looks ugly, I confess," admitted Carraway; "but were there no books—no accounts kept?"

"Oh, he settled that, of course. When my father died, and we asked for the books, where were they?

Burned, he said—burned in the old office that the Yankees fired.
He's a scoundrel, I tell you, sir, and I know him to the core.
He's a rotten scoundrel!"

Carraway caught his breath quickly and drew back as if he had touched unwittingly a throbbing canker. To his oversensitive nature these primal emotions had a crudeness that was vulgar in its unrestraint. He beheld it all—the old wrong and the new hatred—in a horrid glare of light, a disgraceful blaze of trumpets. Here there was no cultured evasion of the conspicuous vice—none of the refinements even of the Christian ethics—it was all raw and palpitating humanity.

"Then my mission is quite useless," he confessed. "I can only add that I am sorrier than I can say sorry for the whole thing, too. If my services could be of any use to you I should not hesitate to offer them, but so far as I see there is absolutely nothing to be done. An old crime, as you know, very often conforms to an appearance of virtue."

He held out his hand, Christopher shook it, and then the lawyer went back into the house to bid good-by to Mrs. Blake. When he came out a few moments later, and passed through the whitewashed gate into the sunken road, he saw that Christopher was still standing where he had left him, the golden afternoon around him, and the bedraggled ducks paddling at his feet.

VIII. Treats of a Passion that is Not Love

Over a distant meadow fluted the silver whistle of a partridge, and Christopher, lifting his head, noted involuntarily the direction of the sound. A covey was hatching down by the meadow brook, he knew—for not a summer mating nor a hidden nest had escaped his eyes—and he wondered vaguely if the young birds were roaming into Fletcher's wheatfield. Then, with a single vigorous movement as if he were settling his thoughts upon him, he crossed the yard, leaped the fence by the barnyard, and started briskly along the edge of a little cattle pasture, where a strange bull bellowed in the shadow of a walnut-tree. At the bottom of the pasture a crumbling rail fence divided his land from Fletcher's, and as he looked over the festoons of poisonous ivy he saw Fletcher himself overseeing the last planting of his tobacco. For a time Christopher watched them as through a mist—watched the white and the black labourers, the brown furrows in which the small holes were bored, the wilted plants thrown carelessly in place and planted with two quick pressures of a bare, earth-begrimed foot. He smelled the keen odours released by the sunshine from the broken soil; he saw the standing beads of sweat on the faces of the planters—Negroes with swollen lips and pleasant eyes like those of kindly animals—and he heard the coarse, hectoring voice of Fletcher, who stood midway of the naked ground. To regard the man as a mere usurper of his land had been an article in the religious creed the child had learned, and as he watched him now, bearded, noisy, assured of his possessions, the sight lashed him like the strokes of a whip on bleeding flesh. In the twenty-five years of his life he had grown fairly gluttonous of hate—had tended it with a passion that was like that of love. Now he felt that he had never really had enough of it—had never feasted on the fruit of it till he was satisfied—had never known the delight of wallowing in it until to-day. Deep-rooted like an instinct as the feeling was, he knew now that there had been hours when, for very weakness of his nature, he had almost forgotten that he meant to pay back Fletcher in the end, when it seemed, after all, easier merely to endure and forget and have it done. Still keeping upon his own land, he turned presently and followed a little brook that crossed a meadow where mixed wild flowers were strewn loosely in the grass. The bull still bellowed in the shadow of the walnut-tree, and he found himself listening with pure delight to the savage cries. Reaching at last a point where the brook turned westward at the foot of a low green hill, he threw himself over the dividing rail fence, and came, at the end of a minute's hurried walk, to the old Blake graveyard, midway of one of Fletcher's fallow fields. The gate was bricked up, after the superstitious custom of many country burial places, but he climbed the old moss-grown wall, where poisonous ivy grew rank and venomous, and landing deep in the periwinkle that carpeted the ground, made his way rapidly to the flat oblong slab beneath which his father lay. The marble was discoloured by long rains and stained with bruised periwinkle, and the shallow lettering was hidden under a fall of dried needles from a little stunted fir-tree; but, leaning over, he carefully swept the dust away and loosened the imprisoned name which seemed to hover like a spiritual presence upon the air.

"HERE LIES ALL THAT IS MORTAL OF CHRISTOPHER BLAKE, WHO DIED IN THE HOPE OF A JOYFUL RESURRECTION, APRIL 12, 1786, AGED 70 YEARS. INTO THY HANDS, O LORD, I COMMIT MY SPIRIT."

Around him there were other graves—graves of all dead Blakes for two hundred years, and the flat tombstones were crowded so thickly together that it seemed as if the dead must lie beneath them row on row. It was all in deep shadow, fallen slabs, rank periwinkle, dust and mould—no cheerful sunshine had ever penetrated through the spreading cedars overhead. Life was here, but it was the shy life of wild creatures, approaching man only when he had returned to earth. A mocking-bird purled a love note in the twilight of a great black cedar, a lizard glided like a gray shadow along one of the overturned slabs, and at his entrance a rabbit had started from the ivy on his father's grave. To climb the overgrown wall and lie upon the periwinkle was like entering, for a time, the world of shades—a world far removed from the sunny meadow and the low green hill.

With his head pillowed upon his father's grave, Christopher stretched himself at full length on the ground and stared straight upward at the darkbrowed cedars. It was such an hour as he allowed himself at long intervals when his inheritance was heavy upon him and his disordered mind needed to retreat into a city of refuge. As a child he had often come to this same spot to dream hopefully of the future, unboylike dreams in which the spirit of revenge wore the face of happiness. Then, with the inconsequence of childhood, he had pictured Fletcher gasping beneath his feet—trampled out like a worm, when he was big enough to take his vengeance and come again into his own. Mere physical strength seemed to him at that age the sole thing needed—he wanted then only the brawny arm and the heart bound by triple brass.

Now, as he stretched out his square, sunburned hand, with its misshapen nails, he laughed aloud at the absurdity of those blunted hopes. To-day he stood six feet three inches from the ground, with muscles hard as steel and a chest that rang sound as a bell, yet how much nearer his purpose had he been as a little child! He remembered the day that he had hidden in the bushes with his squirrel gun and waited with fluttering breath for the sound of Fletcher's footsteps along the road. On that day it had seemed to him that the hand of the Lord was in his own Godlike vengeance nerving his little wrist. He had meant to shoot—for that he had saved every stray penny from his sales of hogs and cider, of watermelons and chinkapins; for that he had bought the gun and rammed the powder home. Even when the thud of footsteps beat down the sunny road strewn with brown honeyshucks, he had felt neither fear nor hesitation as he crouched amid the underbrush. Rather there was a rare exhilaration, warm blood in his brain and a sharp taste in his mouth like that of unripe fruit—as if he had gorged himself upon the fallen honeyshucks. It was the happiest moment of his life, he knew, the one moment when he seemed to measure himself inch by inch with fate; and like all such supreme instants, it fell suddenly flat among the passing hours. For even as the gun was lifted, at the very second that Fletcher's heavy body swung into view, he heard a crackling in the dead bushes at his back, and Uncle Boaz struck up his arm with a palsied hand.

"Gawd alive, honey, you don' wanter be tucken out an' hunged?" the old man cried in terror.

The boy rose in a passion and flung his useless gun aside. "Oh, you've spoiled it! you've spoiled it!" he sobbed, and shed bitter tears upon the ground.

To this hour, lying on his father's grave, he knew that he regretted that wasted powder—that will to slay which had blazed up and died down so soon. Strangely enough, it soothed him now to remember how near to murder he had been, and as he drank the summer air in deep drafts he felt the old desire rekindle from its embers. While he lived it was still possible—the one chance that awaits the ready hand, the final answer of a sympathetic heaven that deals out justice. His god was a pagan god, terrible rather than tender, and there had always been within him the old pagan scorn of everlasting mercy. There were moods even when he felt the kinship with his savage forefathers working in his blood, and at such times he liked to fit heroic tortures to heroic crimes to imagine the lighted stake and his enemy amid the flames. Over him as he lay at full length the ancient cedars, touched here and there with a younger green, reared a dusky tent that screened him alike from the hot sunshine and the bright June sky. Somewhere in the deepest shadow the mocking-bird purled over its single note, and across the lettering on the marble slab beside him a small brown lizard was gliding back and forth. The clean, fresh smell of the cedars filled his nostrils like a balm.

For a moment the physical pleasure in his surroundings possessed his thoughts; then gradually, in a state between waking and sleeping, the curious boughs above took fantastic shapes and were interwoven before his eyes with his earlier memories. There was a great tester bed, with carved posts and curtains of silvery damask, that he had slept in as a child, and it was here that he had once had a terrible dream—a dream which he had remembered to this day because it was so like a story of Aunt Delisha's, in which the devil comes with a red-hot scuttle to carry off a little boy. On that night he had been the little boy, and he had seen the scuttle with its leaping flames so plainly that in his terror he had struggled up and screamed aloud. A moment later he had awakened fully, to find a lighted candle in his face and his father in a flowered dressing-gown sitting beside the bed and looking at him with his sad, bloodshot eyes. "Is the devil gone, father, and did you drive him away?" he asked; and then the tall, white-haired old man, whose mind was fast decaying, did a strange and a pitiable thing, for he fell upon his knees beside the bed and cried out upon Christopher for forgiveness for the selfishness of his long life. "You came too late, my son," he said; "you came twenty years too late. I had given you up long ago and grown hopeless. You came like Isaac to Abraham, but too late—too late!" The boy sat up in bed, huddling in the bedclothes, for the night was chilly. He grew suddenly afraid of his father, the big, beautiful old man in the flowered dressing-gown, and he wished that his mother would come in and take him away. "But I came twins with Lila, father," he replied, trying to speak bravely. "With Lila! Oh, my poor children! my poor children!" cried the old man, and, taking up his candle, tottered to the door. Then Christopher stopped his ears in the pillows, for he heard him moaning to himself as he went back along the hall. He felt all at once terribly frightened, and at last, slipping down the tall bed-steps, he stole on his bare feet to Cynthia's door and crept in beside her. After this, dim years went by when he did not see his father, and the great closed rooms on the north side of the house were as silent as if a corpse lay there awaiting burial. His beautiful, stately mother, who, in spite of her gray hair, had always seemed but little older than himself, vanished as mysteriously from his sight—on a thrilling morning when there were many waving red flags and much hurried marching by of gray-clad troops. Young as he was, he was already beginning to play his boy's share in a war which was then fighting slowly to a finish; and in the wild flutter of events he forgot, for a time, to do more than tip softly when he crossed the hall. She was ill, they told him—too ill to care even about the battles that were fought across the river. The sound of the big guns sent no delicious shivers through her limbs, and there was only Lila to come with him when he laid his ear to the ground and thrilled with the strong shock which seemed to run around the earth. When at last her door was opened again and he went timidly in, holding hands with Lila, he found his mother sitting stiffly erect among her cushions as she would sit for the remainder of her days, blind and half dead, in her Elizabethan chair. His beautiful, proud mother, with the smiling Loves painted above her head!

For an instant he shut his eyes beneath the cedars, seeing her on that morning as a man sees in his dreams the face of his first love. Then another day dawned slowly to his consciousness—a day which stood out clear-cut as a cameo from all the others of his life. For weeks Cynthia's eyes had been red and swollen, and he commented querulously upon them, for they made her homelier than usual. When he had finished, she looked at him a moment without replying, then, putting her arm about him, she drew him out upon the lawn and told him why she wept. It was a mellow autumn day, and they passed over gold and russet leaves strewn deep along the path. A light wind was blowing in the tree-tops, and the leaves were still falling, falling, falling! He saw Cynthia's haggard face in a flame of glowing colours. Through the drumming in his ears, which seemed to come from the clear sky, he heard the ceaseless rustle beneath his feet; and to this day he could not walk along a leaf-strewn road in autumn without seeing again the blur of red-and-gold and the gray misery in Cynthia's face.

"It will kill mother!" he said angrily. "It will kill mother!
Why, she almost died when Docia broke her Bohemian bowl."

"She must never know," answered Cynthia, while the tears streamed unheeded down her cheeks. "When she is carried out one day for her airing, she shall go back into the other house. It is a short time now at best—she may die at any moment from any shock—but she must die without knowing this. There must be quiet at the end, at least. Oh, poor mother! poor mother!"

She raised her hands to her convulsed face, and Christopher saw the tears trickle through her thin fingers,

"She must never know," repeated the boy. "She must never know if we can help it."

"We must help it," cried Cynthia passionately. "We must work our fingers to the bone to help it, you and I."

"And Lila?" asked the boy, curiously just even in the intensity of his emotion. "Mustn't Lila work, too?"

Cynthia sobbed—hard, strangling sobs that rattled like stones within her bosom.

"Lila is only a girl," she said, "and so pretty, so pretty."

The boy nodded.

"Then don't let's make Lila work," he responded sturdily.

Selfish in her supreme unselfishness, the woman turned and kissed his brow, while he struggled, irritated, to keep her off.

"Don't let's, dear," she said, and that was all.

IX. Cynthia

As soon as Christopher had passed out of sight, Cynthia came from the kitchen with an armful of wet linen and began spreading it upon some scrubby lilac bushes in a corner of the yard. After fifteen years it still made her uncomfortable to have Christopher around when she did the family washing, and when it was possible she waited to dry the clothes until he had gone back to the field. In her scant calico dress, with the furrows of age already settling about her mouth, and her pale brown hair strained in thin peaks back from her forehead, she might have stood as the world-type of toil-worn womanhood, for she was of the stuff of martyrs, and the dignity of their high resolve was her one outward grace. Life had been revealed to her as something to be endured rather than enjoyed, and the softer adornments of her sex had not withstood the daily splashes of harsh soapsuds—they had faded like colours too delicate to stand the strain of ordinary use.

As she lifted one of her mother's full white petticoats and turned to wring it dry with her red and blistered hands, a look that was perilously near disgust was on her face—for though she had done her duty heroically and meant to do it until the end, there were brief moments when it sickened her to desperation. She was the kind of woman whose hands perform the more thoroughly because the heart revolts against the task.

Lila, in her faded muslin which had taken the colours of November leaves, came to the kitchen doorway and stood watching her with a cheerful face.

"Has Jim Weatherby gone, Cynthia?"

Cynthia nodded grimly, turning her squinting gaze upon her. "Do you think I'd let him see me hanging out the clothes?" she snapped. Supreme as her unselfishness was, there were times when she appeared to begrudge the least of her services; and after the manner of all affection that comes as a bounty, the unwilling spirit was more impressive than the ready hand.

"I do wish you would make Docia help you," said Lila, in a voice that sounded as if she were speaking in her own defense.

Cynthia wrung out a blue jean shirt of Christopher's, spread it on an old lilac-bush, and pushed a stray lock of hair back with her wrist.

"There's no use talking like that when you know Docia has heart disease and can't scrub the clothes clean," she responded. "If she'd drop down dead I'd like to know what we'd do with mother."

"Well, I'd help you if you'd only let me," protested Lila, on the point of tears. "I've darned your lavender silk the best I could, and I'd just as soon iron as not."

"And get your hands like mine in a week. No, I reckon it's as well for one of us to keep decent. My hands are so knotted I had to tell mother it was gout in the joints, and she said I must have been drinking too much port." She laughed, but her eyes filled with tears, and she wiped them with hard rubs on a twisted garment, which she afterward shook in the air to dry.

"Well, you're a saint, Cynthia, and I wish you weren't," declared Lila almost impatiently. "It makes me feel uncomfortable, as if it were somehow my fault that you had to be so good."

"Being a saint is a good deal like being a woman, I reckon," returned Cynthia dryly. "There's a heap in having been born to it. Aunt Polly, have you put the irons on the fire? The first batch of clothes is almost dry."

Aunt Polly, an aged crone, already stumbling into her dotage, hobbled from the kitchen and gathered up an armful of resinous pine from a pile beside the steps. "Dey's 'mos' es hot es de debbil's wood en iron shovel," she replied, with one foot on the step; adding in a piercing whisper: "I know dat ar shovel, honey, 'caze de debbil he done come fur me in de daid er de night, lookin' moughty peart, too; but I tole 'im he des better bide aw'ile 'caze I 'uz leanin' sorter favo'bly to'ad de Lawd."

"Aunt Polly, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Take those irons off and let them cool."

"Dat's so, Miss Cynthy, en I'se right down 'shamed er myse'f, sho' 'nough, but de shame er hit cyarn tu'n de heart er 'ooman.

De debbil he sutnev did look young en peart, dat he did—en de Lawd He knows, Miss Cynthy, I allers did like 'em young! I 'uz done had nine un um in all, countin' de un—en he wuz Cephus dat run off 'fo' de mah'age wid my bes' fedder baid made outer de gray goose fedders ole miss done throwed away 'caze dey warn' w'ite. Yes, Lawd, dar's done been nine un um, black en yaller, en dar ain' nuver been en ole 'un in de hull lot. Whew! I ain' nuver stood de taste er nuttin' ole lessen he be a 'possum, en w'en hit comes ter en ole man, I d'clar hit des tuns my stomick clean inside out."

"But, Aunt Polly, you're old yourself-it's disgraceful."

Aunt Polly chuckled with flattered vanity.

"I know I is, honey—I know I is, but I'se gwine ter hev a young husban' at de een ef hit tecks de ve'y las' cent I'se got. De las' un he come monst'ous high, en mo'n dat, he wuz sech en outlandish nigger dat he'd a-come high ef I'd got 'im as a Christmas gif'. I had ter gin 'im dat burey wid de bevel glass I bought wid all my savin's, en des es soon es I steps outside de do' he up en toted hit all de way ter de cabin er dat lowlifeted, savigorous, yaller hussy Delphy. Men sutney are tuh'ble slippery folks, Miss Cynthy, en y'all des better look out how you monkey

wid 'em, 'caze I'se done hed nine, en I knows 'em thoo en thoo. De mo' you git, de likelier 'tis you gwine git one dat's worth gittin', dat's vat I 'low."

Cynthia gathered up the scattered garments, which had been left carelessly from the day before, and carried them into the kitchen, where a pine ironing board was supported by two empty barrels. Lila was busily preparing a bowl of gruel for one of the sick old Negroes who still lived upon the meager charity of the Blakes.

"Mother wants you, Cynthia," she said. "I won't do at all, for she can't be persuaded that I'm really grown up, you know. Here, give me some of those clothes. It won't hurt my hands a bit."

Cynthia piled the clothes upon the board, and moistening her finger, applied it to the bottom of the iron. Then she handed it to Lila with a funny little air of anxiety. "This is just right," she said; "be careful not to get your fingers burned, and remember to sprinkle the clothes well. Do you know what mother wants?"

"I think it's about taking something to Aunt Dinah. Docia told her she was sick."

"Then I wish Docia would learn to hold her tongue," commented
Cynthia, as she left the kitchen.

She found Mrs. Blake looking slightly irritated as she wound a ball of white yarn from a skein that Docia was holding between her outstretched hands.

"I hear Dinah is laid up with a stitch in her chest, Cynthia," she said. "You must look in the medicine closet and give her ten grains of quinine and a drink of whisky. Tell her to keep well covered up, and see that Polly makes her hot flaxseed tea every two hours."

"Lila is fixing her some gruel now, mother."

"I said flaxseed tea, my dear. I am almost seventy years old, and I have treated three hundred servants and seen sixty laid in their graves, but if you think you are a better doctor than I am, of course there's nothing to be said. Docia, hold the yarn a little tighter."

"We'll make the flaxseed tea at once, and I'll carry it right over—a breath of air will do me good."

Mrs. Blake sighed. "You mustn't stay too closely with me," she said; "you will grow old before your time, I fear. As it is you have given up your young life to my poor old one."

"I had nothing to give up, mother," replied Cynthia quietly, and in the few words her heart's tragedy was written—since of all lives, the saddest is the one that can find nothing worthy of renouncement. There were hours when she felt that any bitter personal past—that the recollection of a single despairing kiss or a blighted love would have filled her days with happiness. What she craved was the conscious dignity of a broken heart—some lofty memory that she might rest upon in her hours of weakness.

"Well, you might have had, my child," returned her mother.

Cynthia's only answer was to smooth gently the pillows in the old lady's chair. "If you could learn to lean back, dearest, it would rest you so," she said.

"I have never slouched in my life," replied Mrs. Blake decisively, "and I do not care to fall into the habit in my seventieth year. When my last hour comes, I hope at least to meet my God in the attitude becoming a lady, and in my day it would have been considered the height of impropriety to loll in a chair or even to rock in the presence of gentlemen. Your Greataunt Susannah, one of the most modest women of her time, has often told me that once, having unfortunately crossed her knees in the parlour after supper, she suffered untold tortures from "budges" for three mortal hours rather than be seen to do anything so indelicate as to uncross them. Well, well, ladies were ladies in those days, and now Lila tells me it is quite customary for them to sit like men. My blindness has spared me many painful sights, I haven't a doubt."

"Things have changed, dear. I wish they hadn't. I liked the old days, too."

"I'm glad at least to hear you say so. Your Aunt Susannah—and she was the one who danced a minuet with General Lafayette, you know—used to say that patience and humility became a gentlewoman better than satin and fine lace. She was a lady of fashion and a great beauty, so I suppose her opinion counts for something— especially as she was noted for being the proudest woman of her day, and it was said that she never danced with a gentleman who hadn't fought a duel on her account. When she went to a ball it took six small darkies to carry her train, and her escort was always obliged to ride on top of the coach to keep from rumpling the flounces of her petticoat. They always said that I had inherited something of her face and step."

"I'm sure she was never so beautiful as you, mother."

"Ah, well, every one to his taste, my child; and I have heard that she wore a larger shoe. However, this is foolish chatter, and a waste of time. Go and carry Dinah the medicine, and let me see Christopher as soon as he comes in. By the way, Cynthia, have you noticed whether he seeks the society of ladies? Do you think it likely that his affections are engaged?"

"No, no, not at all. He doesn't care for girls; I'm sure of it."

"That seems very strange. Why, at his age, his father had been the object of a dozen love affairs, and been jilted twice, report went, though I had my suspicion from the first that it was the other way. Certainly Miss Peggie Stuart (and he had once been engaged to her) went into a decline immediately after our marriage—but in affairs of the heart, as I have mentioned often before, the only reliable witnesses are those who never tell what they know. Now, as for Christopher, are you quite sure he is as handsome as you say?" "Quite, quite, he's splendid—like the picture of the young David in the Bible." "Then there's something wrong. Does he cough?" "His health seems perfect." "Which proves conclusively that he cherishes a secret feeling. For a man to go twenty-six years without falling in love means that he's either a saint or an imbecile, my dear; and for my part, I declare I don't know which character sits worse upon a gentleman. Can it be one of the Morrisons, do you think? The youngest girl used to be considered something of a beauty by the family; though she was always too namby-pamby for my taste."

"She's fifty by now, if she's a day, mother, and the only thing I ever saw Christopher do for her was to drive a strange bull out of her road." "Well, that sounds romantic; but I fear, as you say, she's really too old for him. How time does fly." Cynthia stooped and carefully arranged the old lady's feet upon the ottoman. "There, now—I'll carry the medicine to Aunt Dinah," she said, "and be back in plenty of time to dress for supper." She found the quinine in an old medicine chest in the adjoining room, and went with it to one of the crumbling cabins which had formed part of the "quarters" in the prosperous days of slavery. Aunt Dinah insisted upon detaining her for a chat, and it was half an hour afterward that she came out again and walked slowly back along the little falling path. The mild June breeze freshened her hot cheeks, and as she passed thoughtfully between the coarse sprays of yarrow blooming along the ragged edges of the fields she felt her spirit freed from the day's burden of unrest. What she wanted just then was to lie for an hour close upon the ground, to renew the vital forces within her by contact with the invigorating earth—to feel Nature at friendly touch with her lips and hands. She would have liked to run like a wild thing through the golden sunshine lying upon the yarrow, following the shy cries of the partridges that scattered at her approach—but there was work for her inside the house, so she went back patiently to take it up. As she entered the little yard, she saw Tucker basking in the sunshine on an old bench beside one of the damask rose-bushes, and she crossed over and stood for a moment in the tall grass before him. "You look so happy, Uncle Tucker. How do you manage it?" "By keeping so, I reckon, my dear. I tell you, this sun feels precious good on the back." She dropped limply on the bench beside him. "Yes, it is pleasant, but I hadn't thought of it." " Well, you'd think of it often enough if you were in my place," pursued Tucker, always garrulous, and grateful for a listener. "I didn't notice things much myself when I was young. The only sights that seemed to count, somehow, were those I saw inside my head, and if you'll believe me, I used to be moody and out of sorts half the time, just like Christopher. Times have changed now, you'll say, and it's true. Why, I've got nothing to do these days but to take a look at things, and I tell you I see a lot now where all was a blank before. You just glance over that old field and tell me what you find," Cynthia followed the sweep of his left arm. "There's first the road, and then a piece of fallow land that ought to be ploughed," she said. "Bless my soul, is that all you see? Why, there is every shade of green on earth in that old field, and almost every one of blue, except azure, which you'll find up in the sky. That little bit of white cloud, no bigger than my hand, is shaped exactly like an eagle's wing. I've watched it for an hour, and I never saw one like it. As for that old pine on top the little knoll, if you look at it long enough you'll see that it's a great big green cross raised against the sky." "So it is, " said Cynthia, in surprise; "so it is."

"Then to come nearer, look at that spray of turtlehead growing by that gray stone—the shadow it throws is as fine as thread lace, and it waves in the breeze just like the flower."

" Oh, it is beautiful, and I never should have seen it."

"And best of all," resumed Tucker, as if avoiding an interruption, "is that I've watched a nestful of young wrens take flight from under the eaves. There's not a play of Shakespeare's greater than that, I tell you." "And it makes you happy—just this?" asked Cynthia wistfully, as the pathos of his maimed figure drove to her heart. "Well, I reckon happiness is not so much in what comes as in the way you take it," he returned, smiling. "There was a time, you must remember, when I was the straightest shot of my day, and something of a lady-killer as well, if I do say it who shouldn't. I've done my part in a war and I'm not ashamed of it. I've taken the enemy's cannon under a fire hot enough to roast an ox, and I've sent more men to eternity than I like to think of; but I tell you honestly there's no battle-field under heaven worth an hour of this old bench. If I had my choice to-day, I'd rather see the flitting of those wrens than kill the biggest Yankee that ever lived. The time was when I didn't think so, but I know now that there's as much life out there in that old field as in the tightest-packed city street I ever saw—purer life, praise God, and sweeter to the taste. Why, look at this poplar leaf that blew across the road; I've studied the pattern of it for half an hour, and I've found out that such a wonder is worth going ten miles to see." "Oh, I can't understand you," sighed Cynthia hopelessly. "I wish I could, but I can't—I was born different—so different." "Bless your heart, honey, I was born different myself, and if I'd kept my leg and my arm I dare say I'd be strutting round on one and shaking the other in the face of God Almighty just as I used to do. A two-legged man is so busy getting about the world that he never has time to sit down and take a look around him. I tell you I see more in one hour as I am now than I saw in all the rest of my life when I was sound and whole. Why, I could sit here all day long and stare up at that blue sky, and then go to bed feeling that my twelve hours were full and brimming over. If I'd never seen anything in my life but that sky above the old pine, I should say at the end 'Thank God for that one good look.'" "I can't understand—I can't understand," repeated Cynthia, in a broken voice, though her face shed a clear, white beam. "I only know that we are all in awful straights, and that to-morrow is the day when I must get up at five o'clock and travel all the way to town to get my sewing." He laid his large pink hand on hers, "Why not let Lila go for you?" "What! to wait like a servant for the bundle and walk the streets all day—I'd go twenty times first!" "My dear, you needn't envy me," he responded, patting her knotted hand. "I took less courage with me when I stormed my heights."

CHAPTER X. Sentimental and Otherwise

In the gray dawn Cynthia came softly downstairs and, passing her mother's door on tiptoe, went out into the kitchen to begin preparations for her early breakfast. She wore a severe black alpaca dress, made from a cast-off one of her mother's, and below her white linen collar she had pinned a cameo brooch bearing the head of Minerva, which had once belonged to Aunt Susannah. On the bed upstairs she had left her shawl and bonnet and a pair of carefully mended black silk mitts, for her monthly visits to the little country town were endured with something of the frozen dignity which supported Marie Antoinette in the tumbrel. It was a case where family pride was found more potent than Christian resignation. When she opened the kitchen door, with her arms full of resinous pine from the pile beside the steps, she found that Tucker had risen before her and was fumbling awkwardly in the safe with his single hand. "Why, Uncle Tucker!" she exclaimed in surprise, "what on earth has happened?" Turning his cheerful face upon her, he motioned to a little wooden tobacco box on the bare table. "A nest full of swallows tumbled down my chimney log in the night," he explained, "and they cried so loud I couldn't sleep, so I thought I might as well get up and dig 'em a worm or two. Do you happen to know where a bit of wool is?" Cynthia threw her bundle of kindling-wood on the hearth and stood regarding him with apathetic eyes. "You'd much better wring their necks," she responded indifferently; "but there's a basketful of wool Aunt Polly has just carded in the closet. How in the world did you manage to dress yourself?" "Oh, it's wonderful what one hand can do when it's put to it. Would you mind fastening my collar, by the way, and any buttons that you happen to see loose?" She glanced over him critically, pulling his clothes in place and adjusting a button here and there. "I do hate to see you in this old jean suit," she said; "you used to look so nice in your other clothes." With a laugh he settled his empty sleeve. "Oh, they're good for warm weather," he responded; "and they wash easily, which is something. Think, too, what a waste it would be to dress half a man in a whole suit of broadcloth." "Oh, don't, don't," she protested, on the point of tears, but he smiled and patted her bowed shoulder. "I got over that long ago, honey," he said gently. "I kicked powerful hard with my one foot at first, but the dust I raised wasn't a speck in the face of God Almighty. There, there, we'll have a fine sunrise, and I'm going out to watch it from my old bench—unless you'll find something for a single hand to do." She shook her head, smiling with misty eyes.

"You'll have breakfast with me, I suppose," she said. "I got up early because I couldn't sleep, but it's not yet four o'clock." For an instant he looked at her gravely. "Worrying about the day?" "A little." "If I could only manage to hobble along with you." "Oh, but you couldn't, dear—and the worst of it is having to wait so long in town for the afternoon stage. I get my sewing, and then I eat my lunch on the old church steps, and then there are four mortal hours when I walk about aimlessly in the sun." "And you wouldn't go to see anybody?" "With my bundle of work, and in this alpaca? Not for worlds!" He sighed, not reproachfully, but with the sympathy which projects itself into states of feeling other than its own. "Well, I wish all the same you'd let Lila go in with you. I think you make a mistake about her, Cynthia; she wouldn't feel the strain of it half so much as you do."

"But I'd feel it for her. No, no, it's better as it is; and she does walk to the cross-roads with me, you know. Old Jacob Weatherby brings her back in his wagon. Christopher can't get off, but he'll come for me at sundown." "Are you sure it isn't young Jim who fetches Lila?" She frowned. "If it were young Jim, her going would be impossible—but the old man knows his place and keeps it." "It's a better place than ours to-day, I reckon," returned Tucker, smiling. "To an observer across the road I dare say the odds would seem considerably in his favour. I met him in the turnpike last Sunday in a brand new broadcloth."

"Oh, I can't bear to hear you," returned Cynthia passionately. "If we must go to the dogs, for heaven's sake, let's go remembering that we are Blakes—or Corbins, if you like."

"Bless your heart, child, I'd just as lief remember I was a Blake or even a Weatherby, for that matter. Why, Jacob Weatherby's grandfather was an honest, self-respecting tiller of the soil when mine used to fish his necktie out of the punch bowl every Saturday night, people said."

She lifted her black skirt above her knees, and pinned it tightly at her back with a large safety pin she had taken from her bosom. Then kneeling on the hearth, she laid the knots of resinous pine on a crumpled newspaper in the great stone fireplace.

"I don't mind your picking flaws in me," she said dryly, "but I do wish you would let my great grandfather rest in his grave. He's about all I've got."

"Well, I beg his pardon for speaking the truth about him," returned Tucker penitently; "and now my swallows are so noisy I must stop their mouths."

He went out humming a tune, while Cynthia hung the boiler from the crane and mixed the corn-meal dough in a wooden tray.

When breakfast was on the table Lila appeared with a reproachful face, hurriedly knotting her kerchief as she entered.

"Oh, Cynthia, you promised to let me get breakfast," she said. "Mother was very restless all night—she dreamed that she was being married over again—so I slept too late."

"It didn't matter, dear; I was awake, and I didn't mind getting up. Are you ready to go?"

"All except my hat." Yawning slightly, she raised her hands and pushed up her clustering hair that was but a shade darker than Christopher's. Trivial as the likeness was, it began and ended with her heavy curls, for her hazel eyes held a peculiar liquid beam, and her face, heart-shaped in outline, had none of the heaviness of jaw which marred the symmetry of his. A little brown mole beside the dimple in her cheek gave the finishing touch of coquetry to the old-world quaintness of her appearance.

As she passed the window on her way to the table she threw a drowsy glance out into the yard.

"Why, there's Uncle Tucker sitting on the ground," she said; "he must be crazy."

Cynthia was pouring the hastily made coffee from the steaming boiler, and she did not look up as she answered.

"You'd better go out and help him up. He's digging worms for some swallows that fell down his chimney."

"Well, of all the ideas!" exclaimed Lila, laughing, but she went out with cheerful sweetness and assisted him to his crutches.

A half-hour later, when the meal was over and Christopher had gone out to the stable, the two women tied on their bonnets and went softly through the hall. As they passed Mrs. Blake's door she awoke and called out sharply. "Cynthia, is that you? What are you doing up so early?" Cynthia paused at strained attention on the threshold. "I'm going to the Morrisons', mother, to spend the day. You know I told you Miss Martha had promised to teach me that new fancy stitch." "But, my dear, surely it is bad manners to arrive before eleven o'clock. I remember once when I was a girl that we went over to Meadow Hall before ten in the morning, and found old Mrs. Dudley just putting on her company cap." "But they begged me to come to breakfast, dear." "Well, customs change, of course; but be sure to take Mrs. Morrison a jar of the green tomato catchup. You know she always fancied it." "Yes, yes; good-by till evening." She moved on hurriedly, her clumsy shoes creaking on the bare planks, and a moment afterward as the door closed behind them they passed out into the first sunbeams. Beyond the whitewashed fence the old field was silvered by the heavy dew, and above it the great pine towered like a burnished cross upon the western sky. To the eastward a solitary thrush was singing—a golden voice straight from out the sunrise. "This is worth getting up for!" said Lila, with a long, joyful breath; and she broke into a tender carolling as spontaneous as the bird's. The bloom of the summer was in her face, and as she moved with her buoyant step along the red clay road she was like a rare flower blown lightly by the wind. To Cynthia's narrowed eyes she seemed, indeed, a heroine descended from old romance—a maiden to whom, even in these degenerate modern days, there must at last arrive a noble destiny. That Lila at the end of her twenty-six years should have wearied of her long waiting and grown content to compromise with fate would have appeared to her impossible—as impossible as the transformation of young Jim Weatherby into the fairy prince.

"Hush!" she said suddenly, shifting her bundle of sewing from one arm to the other; "there's a wagon turning from the branch road." They had reached the first bend beyond the gate, and as they rounded the long curve, hidden by honey-locusts, a light spring wagon came rapidly toward them, with Jim Weatherby, in his Sunday clothes, on the driver's seat. "Father's rheumatism is so bad he couldn't get out to-day," he explained, as he brought the horses to a stand; "so as long as I had to take the butter over, I thought I might save you the five miles." He spoke to Cynthia, and she drew back stiffly. "It is a pleasant day for a walk," she returned dryly. "But it's going to be hot," he urged; "I can tell by the way the sun licks up the dew." A feathery branch of the honey-locust was in his face, and he pushed it impatiently aside as he looked at Lila. "I waited late just to take you," he added wistfully, jumping from his seat and going to the horses' heads. "Won't you get in?" "You will be so tired, Cynthia," Lila persuaded. "Think of the walking you have to do in town." As Jim Weatherby glanced up brightly from the strap he was fastening, the smile in his blue eyes was like a song of love; and when the girl met it she heard again the solitary thrush singing in the sunrise. "You will come?" he pleaded, and this time he looked straight at her.

"Well, I reckon I will, if you're going anyway," said Cynthia at last; "and if I drive with you there'll be no use for Lila to go she can stay with mother."

"But mother doesn't need me," said Lila, in answer to Jim's wistful eyes; "and it's such a lovely day—after getting up so early I don't want to stay indoors."

Without a word Jim held out his band to Cynthia, and she climbed, with unbending dignity, to the driver's seat. "You know you've got that dress to turn, Lila," she said, as she settled her stiff skirt primly over her knees.

"I can do it when I get home," answered Lila, laying her hand on the young man's arm and stepping upon the wheel. "Where shall I sit, Jim?"

Cynthia turned and looked at her coldly.

"You'd be more comfortable in that chair at the back," she suggested, and Lila sat down obediently in the little splitbottomed chair between a brown stone jar of butter and a basket filled with new-laid eggs. The girl folded her white hands in the lap of her faded muslin and listened patiently to the pleasant condescension in Cynthia's voice as she discussed the belated planting of the crops. As the spring wagon rolled in the shade of the honey-locusts between the great tobacco fields, striped with vivid green, the June day filled the younger sister's eyes with a radiance that seemed but a reflection of its own perfect beauty. Not once did her lover turn from Cynthia to herself, but she was conscious, sitting quietly beside the great brown jar, that for him she filled the morning with her presence—that he saw her in the blue sky, in the sunny fields, and in the long red road with the delicate shadowing of the locusts. In her cramped life there had been so little room in which her dreams might wander that gradually the romantic devotion of her old playmate had grown to represent the measure of her emotional ideal. In spite of her poetic face she was in thought soundly practical, and though the plain Cynthia might send a fanciful imagination in pursuit of the impossible, to Lila the only destiny worth cherishing at heart was the one that drew its roots deep from the homely soil about her. The stern class distinctions which had always steeled Cynthia against the friendly advances of her neighbours troubled the younger sister not at all. She remembered none of the past grandeur, the old Blake power of rule, and the stories of gallant indiscretions and powdered beaux seemed to her as worthless as the moth-eaten satin rags which filled the garret. She loved the familiar country children, the making of fresh butter, and honest admiration of her beauty; and except for the colourless poverty in which they lived, she might easily have found her placid happiness on the little farm. With ambition—the bitter, agonised ambition that Cynthia felt for her—she was as unconcerned as was her blithe young lover chatting so merrily in the driver's seat. The very dullness of her imagination had saved her from the awakening that follows wasted hopes.

"The tobacco looks well," Cynthia was saying in her formal tones; "all it needs now is a rain to start it growing. You've got yours all in by now, I suppose."

"Oh, yes; mine was put in before Christopher's," responded Jim, feeling instantly that the woman beside him flinched at his unconscious use of her brother's name.

"He is always late," she remarked with forced politeness, and the conversation dragged until they reached the cross-roads and she climbed into the stage.

"Be sure to hurry back," were her last words as she rumbled off; and when, in looking over her shoulder at the first curve, she saw Lila lift her beaming eyes to Jim Weatherby's face, the protest of all the dust in the old graveyard was in the groan that hovered on her lips. She herself would have crucified her happiness with her own loyal hands rather than have dishonoured by so much as an unspoken hope the high excellences inscribed upon the tombstones of those mouldered dead.

In her shabby black dress, with her heavy bundle under her arm, she passed, a lonely, pathetic figure, through the streets of the little town. The strange smells fretted her, the hot bricks tired her feet, and the jarring noises confused her hazy ideas of direction. On the steps of the old church, where she ate her lunch, she found a garrulous blind beggar with whom she divided her slender meal of bacon and cornbread. After a moment's hesitation, she bought a couple of bananas for a few cents from a fruit-stand at the corner, and coming back, gave the larger one to the beggar who sat complaining in the sun. Then, withdrawing to a conventional distance in the shadow of the steeple, she waited patiently for the slow hours to wear away. Not until the long shadow pointed straight from west to east did the ancient vehicle rattle down the street and the driver pull up for her at the old church steps. Then it was that with her first sigh of relief she awoke to the realisation that through all the trying day her heaviest burden was the memory of Lila's morning look into the face of the man whose father had been a common labourer at Blake Hall.

Three hours later, when, pale and exhausted, with an aching head, she found the stage halting beneath the blasted pine, her pleasantest impression was of Christopher standing in the yellow afterglow beside the old spring wagon. The driver spoke to him, and then, as the horses stopped, turned to toss the weather-beaten mail-bag to the porch of the country store, where a group of men were lounging. Among them Cynthia saw the figure of a girl in a riding habit, who, as the stage halted, gathered up her long black skirt and ran hastily to the roadside to speak to some one who remained still seated in the vehicle.

That Christopher's eyes followed the graceful figure in its finely fitting habit Cynthia noticed with a sudden jealous pang, detecting angrily the warmth of the admiration in his gaze. The girl had met his look, she knew, for when she lifted her face to her companion it was bright with a winter's glow, though the day was warm. She spoke almost breathlessly, too, as if she had been running, and Cynthia overhearing her first low words, held her prim skirt aside, and descended awkwardly over the wheel. She stumbled in reaching the ground, and the girl with a kindly movement turned to help her. "I hope you aren't hurt," she said in crisp, clearcut tones; but the elder woman, recovering herself with an effort, passed on after an ungracious bow. When she reached Christopher he was still standing motionless beside the wagon, and at her first words he started like one awaking from a pleasant daydream. "So you came, after all," he remarked in an absent-minded manner. "Of course I came." She was conscious that she almost snapped the reply. "Did you expect me to spend the night in town?" "In town? Hardly." He laughed gaily as he helped her into the wagon; then, with the reins in his hands, he turned for a last glance at the stage. "Why, what did you think I was waiting for?" "What you are waiting for now is more to the purpose," she retorted, pressing her fingers upon her aching temples. "The afterglow is fading; come, get in."

Without a word he seated himself beside her, and as he touched the horses lightly with the whip the wagon rolled between the green tobacco fields. "How delicious the wild grape is!" exclaimed Cynthia, drawing her breath, "I hope the horses aren't tired. Have they been at the plough?" "Not since dinner time." It was clear that his mind was still abstracted, and he kept his face turned toward the pale red line that lingered on the western horizon. "This is a queer kind of life," he said presently, still looking away from her. "We are so poor and so shut in that we have no idea what people of the world are really like. That girl out there at the cross-roads, now, she was different from any one I'd ever seen. Did you hear where she came from?" "I didn't ask," Cynthia replied, compressing her lips. "I didn't like the way she stared." "Stared? At you?" "No, at you. I'm glad you didn't notice it. It was bold, to say the least." Throwing back his head, he laughed with boyish merriment; and she saw, as he turned his face toward her, that his heavy hair had fallen low across his forehead, giving him a youthful look that became him strangely. At the instant she softened in her judgment of the unknown woman at the cross-roads. "Why, she thought I was some queer beast of burden, I reckon," he returned, "some new farm animal that made her a little curious. Well, whoever she may be, she walked as if she felt herself a princess." Cynthia snorted. "Her habit fitted her like a glove," was her comment, to which she added after a pause: "As things go, it's just as well you didn't hear what she said, I reckon." "About me, do you mean?" "She came down to meet another girl," pursued Cynthia coolly. "I was getting out, so I don't suppose they noticed me—a shabby old creature with a bundle. At any rate, when she kissed the other, she whispered something I didn't hear, and then, 'I've seen that man before—look!' That was when I stumbled, and that made me catch the next 'Where?' her friend asked her quickly, and she answered…." There was a pause, in which the warm dusk was saturated with the fragrance of the grape blossoms on the fence. "She answered?" repeated Christopher slowly. Cynthia looked up and down the road, and then gave the words as if they were a groan: "In my dreams."

BOOK II . THE TEMPTATION

CHAPTER I. The Romance that Might have Been

With July there came a long rain, and in the burst of sunshine which followed it the young tobacco shot up fine and straight and tall, clothing the landscape in a rich, tropical green.

>From morning till night the men worked now in the great fields, removing the numerous "suckers" from the growing plants, and pinching off the slender tops to prevent the first beginnings of a flower, except where, at long spaces, a huge pink cluster would be allowed to blossom and come to seed.

Christopher, toiling all day alone in his own field, felt the clear summer dawn break over him, the golden noon gather to full heat, and the coming night envelop him like a purple mist. Living, as he did, so close to the earth, himself akin to the strong forces of the soil, he had grown gradually from his childhood into a rare physical expression of the large freedom of natural things.

It was an unusually hot day in mid-August—the time of the harvest moon and of the dreaded tobacco fly—that he came home at the dinner hour to find Cynthia standing, spent and pale, beside the well.

"The sun is awful, Christopher; I don't see how you bear it but it makes your hair the colour of ripe wheat."

"Oh, I don't mind the sun," he answered, laughing as he wiped the sweat from his face and stooped for a drink from the tilted bucket. "I'm too much taken up just now with fighting those confounded tobacco flies. They were as thick as thieves last night."

"Uncle Boaz is going to send the little darkies out to hunt them at sundown," returned Cynthia. "I've promised them an apple for every one they catch."

Her gaze wandered over the broad fields, rich in promise, and she added after a moment, "Fletcher's crop has come on splendidly."

"The more's the pity."

For a long breath she looked at him in silence; at the massive figure, the face burned to the colour of terra-cotta, the thick, wheaten-brown hair then, with an impulsive gesture, she spoke in her wonderful voice, which held so many possibilities of passion:

"I didn't tell you, Christopher, that I'd found out the name of the girl at the cross-roads. She went away the day afterward and just got back yesterday."

Something in her tone made the young man look up quickly, his face paling beneath the sunburn.

All the boyish cheerfulness he had worn of late faded suddenly from his look.

"Who is she?" he asked.

"Jim Weatherby knew. He had seen her several times on horseback, and he says she's Maria Fletcher, that ugly little girl, grown up. She hates the life here, he says, and they think she is going to marry before the winter. Fletcher was talking down at the store about a rich man who is in love with her."

Christopher stooped to finish his drink, and then rose slowly to his full height.

"Well, one Fletcher the less will be a good riddance," he said harshly, as he went into the house.

In the full white noon he returned to the field, working steadily on his crop until the sunset. Back and forth among the tall green plants, waist deep in their rank luxuriance, he passed with careful steps and attentive eyes, avoiding the huge "sand leaves" spreading upon the ground and already yellowing in the August weather. As he searched for the hidden "suckers" along the great juicy stalks, he removed his hat lest it should bruise the tender tops, and the golden sunshine shone full on his bared head.

Around him the landscape swept like an emerald sea, over which the small shadows rippled in passing waves, beginning at the rail fence skirting the red clay road and breaking at last upon the darker green of the far-off pines. Here and there a tall pink blossom rose like a fantastic sail from the deep and rocked slowly to and fro in the summer wind. When at last the sun dropped behind the distant wood and a red flame licked at the western clouds, he still lingered on, dreaming idly, while his hands followed their accustomed task. Big green moths hovered presently around him, seeking the deep rosy tubes of the clustered flowers, and alighting finally to leave their danger-breeding eggs under the drooping leaves. The sound of laughter floated suddenly from the small Negro children, who were pursuing the tobacco flies between the furrows. He had ceased from his work, and come out into the little path that trailed along the edge of the field, when he saw a woman's figure, in a gown coloured like April flowers, pass from the new road over the loosened fence-rails. For a breathless instant he wavered in the path; then turning squarely, he met her questioning look with indifferent eyes. The new romance had shriveled at the first touch of the old hatred. Maria, holding her skirt above her ruffled petticoat, stood midway of the little trail, a single tobacco blossom waving over her leghorn hat. She was no longer the pale girl who had received Carraway with so composed a bearing, for her face and her gown were now coloured delicately with an April bloom. "I followed the new road," she explained, smiling, "and all at once it ended at the fence. Where can I take it up again?" He regarded her gravely. "The only way you can take it up again is to go back to it," he answered. "It doesn't cross my land, you know, and—I beg your pardon—but I don't care to have you do so. Besides staining your dress, you will very likely bruise my tobacco." He had never in his life stood close to a woman who wore perfumed garments, and he felt, all at once, that her fragrance was going to his brain. Delicate as it was, he found it heady, like strong drink. "But I could walk very close to the fence," said the girl, surprised. "Aren't you afraid of the poisonous oak?" "Desperately. I caught it once as a child. It hurt so." He shook his head impatiently. "Apart from that, there is no reason why you should come on my land. All the prettiest walks are on the other side—and over here the hounds are taught to warn off trespassers." "Am I a trespasser?" "You are worse," he replied boorishly; "you're a Fletcher." "Well, you're a savage," she retorted, angered in her turn. "Is it simply because I happen to be a Fletcher that you become a bear?" "Because you happen to be a Fletcher," he repeated, and then looked calmly and coolly at her dainty elegance.

"And if I were anybody else, I suppose, you would let me walk along that fence, and even be polite enough to keep the dogs from eating me up?" "If you were anybody else and didn't injure my tobacco—yes."

"But as it is I must keep away?"

"All I ask of you is to stay on the other side." "And if I don't?" she questioned, her spirit flaring up to match with his, "and if I don't?" All the natural womanhood within her responded to the appeal of his superb manhood; all the fastidious refinement with which she was overlaid was alive to the rustic details which marred the finished whole—to the streak of earth across his forehead, to the coarseness of his ill-fitting clothes, to the tobacco juice staining his finger nails bright green. On his side, the lady of his dreams had shrunken to a witch; and he shook his head again in an effort to dispel the sweetness that so strangely moved him. "In that case you will meet the hounds one day and get your dress badly torn, I fear." "And bitten, probably." "Probably." "Well, I don't think it would be worth it," said the girl, in a quiver of indignation. "If I can help it, I shall never set my foot on your land again." "The wisest thing you can do is to keep off," he retorted. Turning, with an angry movement, she walked rapidly to the fence, heedless of the poisonous oak along the way; and Christopher, passing her with a single step, lowered the topmost rails that she might cross over the more easily. "Thank you," she said stiffly, as she reached the other side. "It was a pleasure," he responded, in the tone his father might have used when in full Grecian dress at the fancy ball. "You mean it is a pleasure to assist in getting rid of me?"

"What I mean doesn't matter," he answered irritably, and added, "I wish to God you were anybody else!" At this she turned and faced him squarely as he held the rails. "But how can I help being myself?" she demanded. "You can't, and there's an end of it." "Of what?" "Oh, of everything—and most of all of the evening at the cross-roads." "You saw me then?" she asked. "You know I did," he answered, retreating into his rude simplicity. "And you liked me then?"

"Then," he laughed, "why, I was fool enough to dream of you for a month afterward." "How dare you!" she cried. "Well, I shan't do it again," he assured her insolently. "You can't possibly dislike me any more than I do you," she remarked, drawing back step by step. "You're a savage, and a mean one at that—but all the same, I should like to know why you began to hate me." He laid the topmost rail along the fence and turned away. "Ask your grandfather!" he called back, as he passed into the tobacco field, with her fragrance still in his nostrils.

Maria, on the other side, walked slowly homeward along the new road that had ended so abruptly. Her lip trembled, and, letting her skirt drag in the dust, she put up her hand to suppress the first hint of emotion. It angered her that he had had the power to provoke her so, and for the moment the encounter seemed to have bereft her of her last shreds of womanly reserve. It was as if a strong wind had blown over her, laying her bosom bare, and she flushed at the knowledge that he had heard the fluttering of her breath and seen the indignant tears gather to her eyes—he a boorish stranger who hated her because of her name. For the first time in her life she had run straight against an impregnable prejudice—had felt her feminine charm ineffectual against a stern masculine resistance. She was at the age when the artificial often outweighs the real—when the superficial manner with a woman is apt to be misunderstood, and so to her Christopher Blake now appeared stripped even of his physical comeliness; the interview had left her with an impression of mere vulgar incivility. As she entered the house she met Fletcher passing through the hall with the mail-bag in his hand, and a little later, while she sat in a big chair by her chamber window, Miss Saidie came in and laid a letter in her lap. "It's from Mr. Wyndham, I think, Maria. Shall I light a candle?" "Not yet; it is so warm I like the twilight." "But won't you read the letter?" "Oh, presently. There's time enough." Miss Saidie came to the window and leaned out to sniff the climbing roses, her shapeless figure outlined against the purple dusk spangled with fireflies. Her presence irritated the girl, who stirred restlessly in her chair. "Is he coming, Maria, do you think?"

"If I let him—yes." "And he wants to marry you?" The girl laughed bitterly. "He hasn't seen me in my home yet," she answered, "and our vulgarity may be too much for him. He's very particular, you know." The woman at the window flinched as if she had been struck. "But if he loves you, Maria?" "Oh, he loves me for what isn't me," she answered, "for my 'culture,' as he calls it—for the gloss that has been put over me in the last ten years." "Still if you care for him, dear—" "I don't know—I don't know," said Maria, speaking in the effort to straighten her disordered thoughts rather than for the enlightenment of Miss Saidie. "I was sure I loved him before I came home—but this place upsets me so—I hate it. It makes me feel raw, crude, unlike myself. When I come back here I seem to lose all that I have learned, and to grow vulgar, like Jinnie Spade, at the store." "Not like her, Maria." "Well, I ought to know better, of course, but I don't believe I do—not when I'm here." "Then why not go away? Don't think of us; we can get along as we used to do." "I don't think of you," said the girl. "I don't think of anybody in the world except myself—and that's the awful part—that's the part I hate. I'm selfish to the core, and I know it."

"But you do love Jack Wyndham?" "Oh, I love him to distraction! Light the candle, Aunt Saidie, and let me read his letter. I can tell you, word for word, what is in it before I break the seal. Six months ago I went into a flutter at the sight of his handwriting. Six months before that I was madly in love with Dick Bright—and six months from to-day—Oh, well, I suppose I really haven't much heart to know—and if I ever care for anybody it must be for Jack—that's positive."

Standing beside the lighted candle on the bureau, she read the letter twice over, and then turning away, wrote her answer kneeling beside the big chair at the window.

CHAPTER II. The Romance that Was

Waking in the night she said again, "I love him to distraction," and slipping under the dimity curtains of the bed, sought his letter where she had left it on the bureau. The full light of the harvest moon was in the room—a light so soft that it lay like a yellow fluid upon the floor. It seemed almost as if one might stoop and fill the open palms.

She found the letter thrown carelessly upon the pincushion, and holding it to her lips, paused a moment beside the window, looking beyond the shaven lawn and the clustered oaks to where the tobacco fields lay golden beneath the moon. It was such a night as seemed granted by some kindly deity for the fulfillment of lovers' vows, and the girl, standing beside the open window, grew suddenly sad, as one who sees a vision with the knowledge that it is not life. When presently she went back to bed it was to lie sleepless until dawn, with the love letter held tightly in her hands.

The next day a restlessness like that of fever worked in her blood, and she ran from turret to basement of the roomy old house, calling Will to come and help her find amusement.

"Play ball with me, Will," she said; "I feel as if I were a child to-day." " Oh, it's no fun playing with a girl," replied the boy; "besides, I am going fishing in the river with Zebbadee Blake; I shan't be back till supper," and shouldering his fishing-rod he flung off with his can of worms. Miss Saidie was skimming big pans of milk in the spring-house, and Maria watched her idly for a time, growing suddenly impatient of the leisurely way in which the spoon travelled under the yellow cream. "I don't see how you can be so fond of it," she said at last. "Lord, child, I never could abide dairy work," responded Miss Saidie, setting the skimmed pan aside and carefully lifting another from the flat stones over which a stream of water trickled. "And yet you've done nothing else all your long life," wondered Maria. "When it comes to doing a thing in this world," returned the little woman, removing a speck of dust from the cream with the point of the spoon, "I don't ask myself whether I like it or not, but what's the best way to get it done. I've spent sixty years doing things I wasn't fond of, and I don't reckon I'm any the less happy for having done 'em well." "But I should be," asserted Maria, and then, with her white parasol over her bared head, she started for a restless stroll along the old road under the great chestnuts. She had reached the abandoned ice-pond, and was picking her way carefully in the shadow of the trees, when the baying of a pack of hounds in full cry broke on her ears, and with the nervous tremor she had associated from childhood with the sound, she stopped short in the road and waited anxiously for the hunt to pass. Even as she hesitated, feeling in imagination all the blind terror of the pursuit, and determined to swing into a chestnut bough in case of an approach, a small animal darted suddenly from around the bend in the sunken road, and an instant afterward the hounds in hot chase broke from the cover. For a single breath the girl, dropping her parasol, looked at the lowered branch; then as the small animal neared her her glance fell, and she saw that it was a little yellow dog, with hanging red tongue and eyes bulging in terror. From side to side of the red clay road the creature doubled for a moment in its anguish, and then with a spring, straight as the flight of a homing bird, fled to the shelter of Maria's skirts. Quick as a heart-beat the girl's personal fears had vanished, and as an almost savage instinct of battle awoke in her, she stooped with a protecting movement and, picking the small dog from the ground, held him high above her head as the hounds came on. A moment before her limbs had shaken at the distant cries; now facing the immediate presence of the danger, she felt the rage of her pity flow like an infusion of strong blood through her veins. Until they dashed her to the ground she knew that she would stand holding the hunted creature above her head. Like a wave the pack broke instantly upon her, forcing her back against the body of the chestnut, and tearing her dress, at the first blow, from her bosom to the ground. She had felt their weight upon her breast, their hot breath full in her face, when, in the midst of the confused noises in her ears, she heard a loud oath that rang out like a shot, followed by the strokes of a rawhide whip on living flesh. So close came the lash that the curling end smote her cheek and left a thin flame from ear to mouth. The lessening sounds became all at once like the silence; and when the hounds, beaten back, slunk, whimpering, to heel, she lowered her eyes until she looked straight into the face of Christopher Blake. "My God! You have pluck!" he said, and his face was like that of a dead man. Still holding the dog above her head, she lay motionless against the body of the tree. "Drive the beasts away," she pleaded like a frightened child. Without a word he turned and ordered the hounds home, and they crawled obediently back along the sunken road. Then he looked at her again. "I saw them start the dog on my land," he said, "and I ran across the field as soon as I could find my whip. If I hadn't come up when I did they would have torn you to pieces. Not another man in the world could have brought them in. Look at your dress." Glancing down, she followed the long slit from bosom to hem. "I hate them!" she exclaimed fiercely. "So it was your dog they started?" "Mine!" She lowered the yellow cur, holding him close in her arms, where he nestled shivering. "I never saw him before, but he's mine now; I saved him. I shall name him Agag, because the bitterness of death is past." "Well, rather—Look here," he burst out impulsively, "you've got the staunchest pluck I ever saw. I never knew a man brave enough to stand up against those hounds—and you—why, I don't believe you flinched an eyelash, and—by George the dog wasn't yours after all." " As if that made a difference!" she flashed out. "Why, he ran to me for help—and they might have killed me, but I'd never have given him up."

"I believe you," he declared. She was conscious of a slight thrill that passed quickly, leaving her white and weak. "I feel tired," she said, pressing hard against the tree. "Will you be so good as to pick up my parasol?" "Tired!" he exclaimed, and after a moment, "Your face is hurt—did the dogs do it?" She shook her head. "You struck me with your whip." "Is that so? I can't say after this that I never lifted my hand against a woman—but harsh measures are sometimes necessary, I reckon. Does it smart?" She touched the place lightly. "Oh, it's no matter!" she returned. "I suppose I ought really to thank you for taking the trouble to save my life but I don't, because, after all, the hounds are yours, you know." "Yes, I know; and they're good hounds, too, in their way. The dog had no business on their land." "And they're taught to warn off trespassers? Well, I hardly fancy their manner of conveying the hint." "It is sometimes useful, all the while."

"Ah, in case of a Fletcher, I presume."

"In case of a Fletcher," he repeated, his face darkening. "do you know I had entirely forgotten who you were?"

"It's time you were remembering it," she returned, "for I am most decidedly a Fletcher."

For an instant he scowled upon her.

"Then you are most decidedly a devil," was his retort, as he stooped to pick up her parasol from the road. "There's not much left of it," he remarked, handing it to her.

"As things go, I dare say I ought to be grateful that they spared the spokes," she said impatiently. "It does seem disagreeable that I can't go for a short stroll along my own road without the risk of having my clothes torn from my back. You really must keep your horrid beasts from becoming a public danger."

"They never chase anything that keeps off my farm," he replied coolly. "There's not so well trained a pack anywhere in the county. No other dogs around here could have been beaten back at the death."

"I fear that doesn't afford me the gratification you seem to feel—particularly as the death you allude to would have been mine. I suppose I ought to be overpowered with gratitude for the whole thing, but unfortunately I'm not. I have had a very unpleasant experience and I can't help feeling that I owe it to you."

"You're welcome to feel about it anyway you please," he responded, as Maria, tucking the dog under her arm, started down the road to the Hall, the tattered parasol held straight above her head.

At the house she carried Agag to her room, where she spent the afternoon in the big chair by the window. Miss Saidie, coming in with her dinner, inquired if she were sick, and then picked up the torn dress from the bed.

"Why, Maria, how on earth did you do it?"

"Some hounds jumped on me in the road."

"Well, I never! They were those dreadful Blake beasts, I know. I declare, I'll go right down and speak to Brother Bill about 'em."

"For heaven's sake, don't," protested the girl. "We've had quarrelling enough as it is—and, tell me, Aunt Saidie, have you ever known what it was all about?"

Miss Saidie was examining the rent with an eye to a possible mending, and she did not look up as she answered. "I never understood exactly myself, but your grandpa says they squandered all their money and then got mad because they had to sell the place. That's about the truth of it, I reckon."

"The Hall belonged to them once, didn't it?"

"Oh, a long time ago, when they were rich. Sakes alive, Maria, what's the matter with your face?"

"I struck it getting away from the hounds. It's too bad, isn't it? And Jack coming so soon, too. Do I look very ugly?"

"You're a perfect fright now, but I'll fix you a liniment to draw the bruise away. It will be all right in a day or two. I declare, if you haven't gone and brought a little po'-folksy yellow dog into the house." Maria was feeding Agag with bits of chicken from her plate, bending over him as he huddled against her dress.

"I found him in the road," she returned, "and I'm going to keep him. I saved him from the hounds."

"Well, it seems to me you might have got a prettier one," remarked Miss Saidie, as she went down to mix the liniment.

It was several mornings after this that Fletcher, coming into the dining-room where Maria sat at a late breakfast, handed her a telegram, and stood waiting while she tore it open.

"Jim Weatherby brought it over from the crossroads," he said. "It got there last night."

"I hope there's nobody dead, child," observed Miss Saidie, from the serving-table, where she was peeling tomatoes.

"More likely it points to a marriage, eh, daughter?" chuckled
Fletcher jocosely.

The girl folded the paper and replaced it carefully in the envelope. "It's from Jack Wyndham," she said, "and he comes this evening. May I take the horses to the crossroads, grandpa?"

"Well, I did have a use for them," responded Fletcher, in high good-nature, "but, seeing as your young fellow doesn't come every day, I reckon I'll let you have 'em out."

Maria flinched at his speech; and then as the clear pink spread evenly in her cheeks, she spoke in her composed tones. "I may as well tell you, grandpa, that we shall marry almost immediately," she said.

CHAPTER III. Fletcher's Move and Christopher's Counterstroke

Not until September, when he lounged one day with a glass of beer in the little room behind Tom Spade's country store, did Christopher hear the news of Maria's approaching marriage. It was Sol Peterkin who delivered it, hiccoughing in the enveloping smoke from several pipes, as he sat astride an overturned flour barrel in one corner.

"I jest passed a wagonload of finery on the way to the Hall," he said, bulging with importance. "It's for the gal's weddin', I reckon; an' they do say she's a regular Jezebel as far as clothes go. I met her yestiddy with her young man that is to be, an' the way she was dressed up wasn't a sight for modest eyes. Not that she beguiled me, suh, though the devil himself might have been excused for mistakin' her for the scarlet woman—but I'm past the time of life when a man wants a woman jest to set aroun' an' look at. I tell you a good workin' pair of hands goes to my heart a long ways sooner than the blackest eyes that ever oggled."

"Well, my daughter Jinnie has been up thar sewin' for a month," put in Tom Spade, a big, greasy man, who looked as if he had lived on cabbage from his infancy, "an' she says that sech a sight of lace she never laid eyes on. Why, her very stockin's have got lace let in 'em, Jinnie says."

"Now, that's what I call hardly decent," remarked Sol, as he spat upon the dirty floor. "Them's the enticin' kind of women that a fool hovers near an' a wise man fights shy of. Lace in her stockin's! Well, did anybody ever?"

"She's got a pretty ankle, you may be sho'," observed Matthew Field, a long wisp of a man who had married too early to repent it too late, "an' I must say, if it kills me, that I always had a sharp eye for ankles."

"It's a pity you didn't look as far up as the hand," returned Tom Spade, with boisterous mirth. "I have heard that Eliza lays hers on right heavy."

"That's so, suh, that's so," admitted Matthew, puffing smoke like a shifting engine, "but that's the fault of the marriage service, an' I'll stand to it at the Judgment Day yes, suh, in the very presence of Providence who made it. I tell you, 'twill I led that woman to the altar she was the meekest-mouthed creetur that ever wiggled away from a kiss. Why, when I stepped on her train jest as I swung her up the aisle, if you believe me, all she said was, 'I hope you didn't hurt yo' foot'; an', bless my boots, ten minutes later, comin' out of church, she whispered in my year, 'You white-livered, hulkin' hound, you, get off my veil!' Well, well, it's sad how the ceremony can change a woman's heart."

"That makes it safer always to choose a widow," commented Sol. "Now, they do say that this is a fine weddin' up at the Hall— but I have my doubts. Them lace let in stockin's ain't to my mind."

"What's the rich young gentleman like?" inquired Tom Spade, with interest. "Jinnie says he's the kind of man that makes kissin' come natural—but I can't say that that conveys much to the father of a family."

"Oh, he's the sort that looks as if God Almighty had put the finishin' touches an' forgot to make the man," replied Sol. "He's got a mustache that you would say went to bed every night in curl papers."

Christopher pushed back his chair and drained his glass standing, then with a curt nod to Tom Spade he went out into the road.

It was the walk of a mile from the store to his house, and as he went on he fell to examining the tobacco, which appeared to ripen hour by hour in the warm, moist season. There was no danger of frost as yet, and though a little of Fletcher's crop had already been cut, the others had left theirs to mature in the favourable weather. From a clear emerald the landscape had changed to a yellowish green, and the huge leaves had crinkled at the edges like shirred silk. Here and there pale-brown splotches on a plant showed that it had too quickly ripened, or small perforations revealed the destructive presence of a hidden tobacco worm.

As Christopher neared the house the hounds greeted him with a single bay, and the cry brought Cynthia hastily out upon the porch and along the little path. At the gate she met him, and slipping her hand under his arm, drew him across the road to the rail fence that bordered the old field. At sight of her tearless pallor his ever-present fear shot up, and without waiting for her words he cried out quickly: "Is mother ill?"

"No, no," she answered, "oh, no; but, Christopher, it is the next worse thing."

He thought for a breath. "Then she has found out?"

"It's not that either," she shook her head. "Oh, Christopher, it's Fletcher!"

"It's Fletcher! What in thunder have we to do with Fletcher?"

"You remember the deed of trust on the place—the three hundred dollars we borrowed when mother was sick. Fletcher has bought it from Tom Spade and he means to foreclose it in a week. He has advertised the farm at the cross-roads."

He paled with anger. "Why, I saw Tom about it three days ago," he said, striking the rotten fence rail until it broke and fell apart; "he told me it could run on at the same interest."

"It's since then that Fletcher has bought it. He meant it as a surprise, of course, to drive us out whether or no, but Sam Murray came straight up to tell you."

He stood thinking hard, his eyes on the waving goldenrod in the old field.

"I'll sell the horses," he said at last.

"And starve? Besides, they wouldn't bring the money."

"Then we'll sell the furniture—every last stick! We'll sell the clothes from our backs—I'll sell myself into slavery before Fletcher shall beat me now!"

"We've sold all we've got," said Cynthia; "the old furniture is too heavy—all that's left; nobody about here wants it."

"I tell you I'll find those three hundred dollars if I have to steal them. I'd rather go to prison than have Fletcher get the place."

"Then he'd leave it in the end," remarked Cynthia hopelessly; adding after a pause, "I've thought it all out, dear, and we must steal the money—we must steal it from mother."

"From mother!" he echoed, touched to the quick.

"You know her big diamond," sobbed the woman, "the one in her engagement ring, that she never used to take off, even at night, till her fingers got so thin."

"Oh, I couldn't!" he protested.

"There's no other way," pursued Cynthia, without noticing him. "Surely, it is better than having her turned out in her old age—surely, anything is better than that. We can take the ring to-night after she goes to bed, and pry the diamond from the setting; it is held only by gold claws, you know. Then we will put in it the piece of purple glass from Docia's wedding ring—the shape is the same; and she will never find it out. Oh, mother! mother!"

"I can't, "returned Christopher stubbornly; "it is like robbing her, and she so blind and helpless. I cannot do it."

"Then I will," said Cynthia quietly, and, turning from him, she walked rapidly to the house.

Later that night, when he had gone up to his little garret loft, she came to him with the two rings in her outstretched hand—the superb white diamond and the common purple setting in Docia's brass hoop.

"Lend me your knife," she said, kneeling beside the smoky oil lamp; and without a word he drew his claspknife from his pocket, opened the blade, and held the handle toward her. She took it from him, and then knelt motionless for an instant looking at the diamond, which shone like a star in her hollowed palm. Presently she stooped and kissed it, and then taking the fine point of the blade, carefully pried the gold claws back from the imprisoned stone.

"She has worn it for fifty years," she said softly, seeing the jewel contract and give out a deeper flame to her misty eyes.

"It is robbery," he protested.

"It is robbery for her sake!" she flashed out angrily.

"All the same, it seems bitterly cruel."

With deft fingers she removed the bit of purple glass from Docia's ring and inserted it between the gold claws, which she pressed securely down. "To the touch there is no difference," she said, closing her eyes. "She will never know."

Rising from her knees, she gazed steadily at the loosened diamond lying in her hand; then, wrapping it in cotton, she placed it in a little wooden box from a jeweller of fifty years ago. "You must get up to-morrow and take it to town," she went on. "Carry it to Mr. Withers—he knows us. There is no other way," she added hastily.

"There is no other way, I know," he repeated, as he held out his hand.

"And you'll be back after sundown."

"Not until night. I shall walk over from the cross-roads."

For a time they were both silent, and he, walking to the narrow window, looked out into the moist darkness. The smell of the oil lamp oppressed the atmosphere inside, and the damp wind in his face revived in a measure his lowered spirits. He seemed suddenly able to cope with life—and with Fletcher.

Far away there was a faint glimmer among the trees, now shining clear, now almost lost in mist, and he knew it to be a lighted window at Blake Hall. The thought of Maria's lace stockings came to him all at once, and he was seized with a rage that was ludicrously large for so small a cause. Confused questions whirled in his brain, struggling for recognition: "I am here and she is there, and what is the meaning of it all? I know in spite of everything I might have loved her, and yet I know still better that it is not love, but hate I now feel. What is the difference, after all? And why this eternal bother of possibilities?" He turned presently and spoke:

"And you got this without her suspecting it?"

"She was sleeping like a child, and Lila was in the little bed in her chamber. Often she is restless, disturbed by her dreams, but to-night she lies very quiet, and she smiled once as if she were so happy."

"And to-morrow she will wear the ring with its setting of purple glass."

"She will never know—see, it fits perfectly. I have fastened it carefully. After all, what does it matter to her—the ring is still the same, and the value of it was for her in the association." Again he looked out of the window, and the distant glimmer gathered radiance and shone brightly among the trees. "I am here and she is there, and what is the meaning of it all?"

CHAPTER IV. A Gallant Deed that Leads to Evil

Two days later Christopher met Fletcher in the little room behind the store and paid down the three hundred dollars in the presence of Sam Murray. Several loungers, who had been seasoning their drinks with leisurely stories, hastily drained their glasses and withdrew at Fletcher's entrance, and when the three men came together to settle the affair of the mortgage they were alone in the presence of the tobacco-stained walls, the square pine table with its dirty glasses, and the bills of notice posted beside the door. Among them Christopher had seen the public advertisement of his farm—a rambling statement in large letters, signifying that the place would be sold for debt on Monday, the twenty-fifth of September, at twelve o'clock. "I want the money right flat down. Are you sure you've got it?" were Fletcher's first words after his start of angry surprise. For answer Christopher drew the roll of bills from his pocket and counted them out upon the table. "Here it is," he said, "and I am done with you for good and all—with you and your rascally cheating ways," "Come, come, let's go easy," warned Sam Murray, a fat, well-to-do farmer, who was accustomed to act the part of a lawyer in small transactions. Fletcher flushed purple and threw off his rage in a sneering guffaw. "Now that sounds well from him, doesn't it?" he inquired "when everybody knows he hasn't a beggarly stitch on earth but that strip of land he thinks so much of." "And whose fault is that, Bill Fletcher?" demanded the young man, throwing the last note down. "Oh, well, I don't bear you any grudge," responded Fletcher, with an abrupt assumption of goodnatured tolerance; "and to show I'm a well-meaning man in spite of abuse, I'll let the debt run on two years longer at the same interest if you choose."

Christopher laughed shortly. "That's all right, Sam," he said, without replying directly to the offer. "I owe him too much already to hope to pay it back in a single lifetime." "Well, you're a cantankerous, hard-headed fool, that's all I've got to say," burst out Fletcher, swallowing hard, and the sooner you get to the poorhouse along your own road the better it'll be for the rest of us." "You may be sure I'll take care not to go along yours. I'll have honest men about me, at any rate." "Then it's more than you've got a right to expect."

Christopher grew pale to the lips. "What do you mean, you scoundrel?" he cried, taking a single step forward. "Come, come, let's go easy," said Sam Murray persuasively, rising from his chair at the table. "Now that this little business is all settled there's no need for another word. I haven't much opinion of words myself, anyhow. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say." "What do you mean?" repeated Christopher, without swerving from his steady gaze. Tom Spade glanced in at the open door, and, catching Fletcher's eye, hurriedly retreated. A small boy with a greasy face came in and gathered up the glasses with a clanking noise. "What do you mean, you coward?" demanded Christopher for the third time. He had not moved an inch from the position he had first assumed, but the circle about his mouth showed blue against the sunburn on his face. Fletcher raised his hand and spoke suddenly with a snort. "Oh, you needn't kick so about swallowing it," he said. "Everybody knows that your grandfather never paid a debt he owed, and your father was mighty little better. He was only saved from becoming a thief by being a drunkard." He choked over the last word, for Christopher, with an easy, almost leisurely movement, had struck him full in the mouth. The young man's arm was raised again, but before it fell Sam Murray caught it back. "I say, Tom, there's the devil to pay here!" he shouted, and Tom Spade rushed hurriedly through the doorway. "Now, now, that'll never do, Mr. Christopher," he reasoned, with a deference he would never have wasted upon Fletcher. "Why, he's old enough to be yo' pa twice over."

A white fleck was on Fletcher's beard, and as he wiped it away he spoke huskily. "It's a clear case of assault and I'll have the law on him," he said. "Sam Murray, you saw him hit me square in the face."

"Bless your life, I wasn't looking, suh," responded Sam pleasantly. "I miss a lot in this life by always happening to look the other way."

"I'll have the law on you," cried Fletcher again, shaking back his heavy eyebrows.

"You're welcome to have every skulking hound in the county on me," Christopher replied, loosening Sam Murray's restraining grasp. "If I can settle you I reckon I can settle them; but the day you open your lying mouth to me again I'll shoot you down as I would a mad dog—and wash my hands clean afterward!"

He looked round for his harvest hat, picked it up from the floor where it had fallen, and walked slowly out of the room.

In the broad noon outside he staggered an instant, dazzled by the glare.

"Had a drop too much, ain't you, Mr. Christopher?" a voice inquired at his side, and, looking down, he saw Sol Peterkin sitting on a big wooden box just outside the store.

"Not too much to mind my own business," was his curt reply.

"Oh, no harm's meant, suh, an' I hope none's taken," responded the little man good-naturedly. "I saw you walk kinder crooked, that was all, an'it came to me that you might be needin' an arm toward home. Young gentlemen will be gentlemen, that's the truth, suh, an' in my day I reckon I've steadied the legs of mo' young beaux than you could count on your ten fingers. Good Lord, when it comes to thinkin' of those Christmas Eve frolics that we had befo' the war! Why, they use to say that you couldn't get to the Hall unless you swam your way through apple toddy. Jest to think! an' here I've been settin' an' countin' the bundles goin' up thar now—"

"I'm looking for a box, Tom," said a clear voice at Christopher's back, "a big paper hat-box that ought to have come by express—"

He turned quickly and saw Maria Fletcher in a little cart in the road, with a strange young man holding the reins. As Christopher swung round, she nodded pleasantly, but with a cool stare he passed down the steps and out into the road, carrying with him a distasteful impression of the strange young man. Yet from that first hurried glimpse he had brought away only the picture of a brown mustache.

"By George, I'd like to see that fellow in the prize ring," he heard the stranger remark as he went by. "Do they have knock-outs around here, I wonder?"

"Oh, I dare say he'd oblige you with one if you took the trouble to tread on his preserves," was the girl's laughing rejoinder.

A massive repulsion swept over Christopher, pervading his entire body—repulsion that was but a recoil from his exhausted rage. In this new emotion there were both weariness and self-pity, and to his mental vision there showed clearly, with an impersonal detachment, his own figure in relation to the scenes among which he moved. "That is I yonder," he might have said had he been able to disentangle thought from sensation, "plodding along there through the red mud in the road. Look at the coarse clothes, smelling of axle-grease, the hands knotted by toil and stained with tobacco juice, the face soiled with sweat and clay. That is I, who was born with the love of ease and the weakness to temptation in my blood, with the love, too, of delicate food, of rare wines, and of beautiful women. Once I craved these things; now the thought of them troubles me no longer, for I work in the sun all day and go home to enjoy my coarse food. Is it because I have been broken to this life as a young horse is broken to the plough, or have all the desires I have known been swallowed up in a single hatred—a hatred as jealous and as strong as love?"

It was his nightly habit, lying upon his narrow bed in the little loft, to yield some moments before sleeping to his idle dreams of vengeance—to plan exquisite punishments and impossible retaliations. In imagination he had so often seen Fletcher drop dead before him, had so often struck the man down with his own hand, that there were hours when he almost believed the deed to have been done—when something like madness gripped him, and his hallucinations took the shape and colour of life itself. At such times he was conscious of the exhilaration that comes in the instants of swift action, when events move quickly, and one rises beyond the ordinary level of experience. When the real moment came—the supreme chance—he wondered if he would meet it as triumphantly as he met his dreams? Now, plodding along the rocky road, he went over again all the old schemes for the great revenge.

The small cart whirled past him, scattering dried mud drops in his face, and he caught the sound of bright girlish laughter. Looking after it, he saw the flutter of cherry-coloured ribbons coiling outward in the wind, and he remembered, watching the gay streamers, that the only woman he had ever kissed was eating cherries at the moment. Trivial as the recollection was, it started other associations, and he followed the escaping memory of that boyish romance, blithe and short-lived, which was killed at last by a single yielded kiss. At sixteen it had seemed to him that when he caught the girl of the cherries in his arms he should hold veritable happiness; and yet afterward there was only a great heaviness and something of the repulsion that he felt to-day. Happiness was not to be found on a woman's lips he had learned this in his boyhood; and then even as the knowledge returned to him he found himself savagely regretting that he had not kissed Maria Fletcher the day he found her on his land—a kiss of anger, not of love, which she would have loathed all her life—and have remembered! To have her utterly forget him—pass on serenely into her marriage, hardly remembering that he hated her—this was the bitterest thing he had to face; but with the brutal wish, he softened in recalling the tremor of her lip as she turned away—the indignant quiver of her eyelashes. Again came the thought: "I know in spite of everything I might have loved her, and yet I know still better that it is not love, but hate I now feel." Her fragrance, floating in the sunshine, filled his nostrils, and involuntarily he glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to find a dropped handkerchief in the road. None was there—only a scattered swarm of butterflies drifting like yellow rose-leaves on the wind.

Upon reaching the house he found that his mother had asked for him, and running hastily up to change his clothes, he came down and bent over the upright Elizabethan chair. "I have been worrying a good deal about you, my son," she said, with a sprightly gesture in which the piece of purple glass struck the dominant note. "Are you quite sure that you are feeling perfectly well? No palpitations of the heart when you go upstairs? and no particular heaviness after meals? I dreamed about you all night long, and though there's not a woman in the world freer from superstition, I can't help feeling uneasy." Taking her hand, he gently caressed the slender fingers. "Why, I'm a regular ox, mother," he returned, laughing, —my muscle is like iron, and I assure you I'm ready for my meals day or night. There's no use worrying about me, so you'd as well give it up." "I can't understand it, I really can't," protested Mrs. Blake, still unconvinced. "I am an old woman, you know, and I am anxious to have you settled in life before I die—but there seems to be a most extraordinary humour in the family with regard to marriage. I'm sure your poor father would turn in his grave at the very idea of his having no grand-children to come after him." "Well, there's time yet, mother; give us breathing space." "There's not time in my day, Christopher, for I am very old, and half dead as it is—but it does seem hard that I am never to be present at the marriage of a child. As for Cynthia, she is out of the question, of course, which is a great pity. I have very little patience with an unmarried woman—no, not if she were Queen Elizabeth herself though I do know that they are sometimes found very useful in the dairy or the spinning-room. As for an old bachelor, I have never seen the spot on earth—and I've lived to a great age—where he wasn't an encumbrance. They really ought to be taught some useful occupation, such as skimming milk or carding wool." "I hardly think either of those pursuits would be to my taste," protested Christopher, "but I give you leave to try your hand on Uncle Tucker." "Tucker has been a hero, my son," rejoined the old lady in a stately voice, "and the privilege of having once been a hero is that nobody expects you to exert yourself again. A man who has taken the enemy's guns single-handed, or figured prominently in a society scandal, is comfortably settled in his position and may slouch pleasantly for the remainder of his life. But for an ordinary gentleman it is quite different, and as we are not likely to have another war, you really ought to marry. You are preparing to go through life too peacefully, my son." "Good Lord!" exclaimed Christopher, "are you hankering after squabbles? Well, you shan't drag me into them, at any cost. There's Uncle Tucker to your hand, as I said before." "I'm sure Tucker might have married several times had he cared about it," replied Mrs. Blake reprovingly. "Miss Matoaca Bolling always had a sentiment for him, I am certain, and even after his misfortune she went so far as to present him with a most elaborate slipper of red velvet ornamented with steel beads. I remember well her consulting me as to whether it would be better to seem unsympathetic and give him two or to appear indelicate and offer him one. I suggested that she should make both for the same foot, which, I believe, she finally decided to do." "Well, well, this is all very interesting, mother," said Christopher, rising from his seat, "but I've promised old Jacob Weatherby to pass my word on his tobacco. On the way down, however, I'll cast my eyes about for a wife." "Between here and the Weatherbys' farm? Why, Christopher!" "That's all right, but unless you expect me to pick up one on the roadside I don't see how we'll manage. I'll do anything to oblige you, you know, even marry, if you'll find me a good, sensible woman." The old lady's eyelids dropped over her piercing black eyes, which seemed always to regard some far-off, ecstatic vision. Three small furrows ran straight up and down her forehead, and she lifted one delicate white hand to rub them out. "I don't like joking on so serious a subject, my son," she said. "I'm sure Providence expects every man to do his duty, and to remain unmarried seems like putting one's personal inclination before the intentions of the Creator. Your grandfather Corbin used to say he had so high an opinion of marriage that if his fourth wife —and she was very sickly—were to die at once, he'd marry his fifth within the year. I remember that Bishop Deane remarked it was one of the most beautiful tributes ever paid the marriage state—especially as it was no idle boast, for, as it happened, his wife died shortly afterward, and he married Miss Polly Blair before six months were up." "What a precious old fool he was!" laughed the young man, as he reached the door, passing out with a horrified "What, Christopher! Your own grandfather?" ringing in his ears. In the yard he found Cynthia drawing water at the well, and he took the heavy bucket from her and carried it into the kitchen. "You'd better change your clothes," she remarked, eyeing him narrowly, "if you're going back to the field." "But I'm not going back; the axe handle has broken again and I'll have to borrow Jim Weatherby's. There's no use trying to mend that old handle any more. It'll have to lie over till after tobacco cutting, when I can make a new one." "Oh, you might as well keep Jim's altogether," returned Cynthia irritably, loath to receive favours from her neighbours. "The first thing we know he will be running this entire place." "I reckon he'd make a much better job of it," replied Christopher, as he swung out into the road. On the whitewashed porch of the Weatherbys' house he found old Jacob—a hale, clearly old man with cheeks like frosted winter apples—gazing thoughtfully over his fine field of tobacco, which had grown almost to his threshold. "The weather's going to have a big drop to-night," he said reflectively; "I smell it on the wind. Lord! Lord! I reckon I'd better begin on that thar tobaccy about sunup—and yet another day or so of sun and September dew would sweeten it consider'ble. How about yours, Mr. Christopher?" "I'll cut my ripest plants to-morrow," answered Christopher, sniffing the air. "A big drop's coming, sure enough, but I don't scent frost as yet—the pines don't smell that way." They discussed the tobacco for a time—the rosy, genial old man, whom age had mellowed without souring—listening with a touching deference to his visitor's casual words; and when at last Christopher, with the axe on his shoulder, started leisurely homeward, "the drop" was already beginning, and the wind blew cool and crisp across the misty fields, beyond which a round, red sun was slowly setting. Level, vast and dark, the tobacco swept clear to the horizon. Between Weatherby's and the little store there was an abrupt bend in the road, where it shot aside from a steep descent in the ground; and Christopher had reached this point when he saw suddenly ahead of him a farm wagon driven forward at a reckless pace. As it neared him he heard the wheels thunder on the rocky bed of the road, and saw that the driver's seat was vacant, the man evidently having been thrown some distance back. The horses—a young pair he had never seen before—held the bits in their mouths; and it was with a hopelessness of checking their terrible speed that he stepped out of the road to give them room. The next instant he saw that they were making straight for the declivity from which the road shot back, seeing in the same breath that the driver of the wagon, not falling clear, had entangled himself in the long reins and was being dragged rapidly beneath the wheels. Tossing his axe aside, he sprang instantly at the horses' heads, hanging with his whole powerful weight upon their mouths. Life or death was nothing to him at the moment, and he seemed to have only an impersonal interest in the multiplied sensations. What followed was a sense of incalculable swiftness, a near glimpse of blue sky, the falling of stars around him in the road, and after these things a great darkness.

When he came to himself he was lying in a patch of short grass, with a little knot of men about him, among whom he recognised Jim Weatherby. "I brought them in, didn't I?" he asked, struggling up; and then he saw that his coat sleeves were rent from the armholes, leaving his arms bare beneath his torn blue shirt. Cynthia's warning returned to him, and he laughed shortly. "Well, I reckon you could bring the devil in if you put all your grip on him," was Jim's reply; "as it is, you're pretty sore, ain't you?" "Oh, rather, but I wish I hadn't spoiled my coat." He was still thinking of Cynthia. "God alive, man, it's a mercy you didn't spoil your life. Why, another second and the horses would have been over that bank yonder, with you and young Fletcher under the wagon."

Christopher rose slowly from the ground and stood erect.

"With me—and who under the wagon?—and who?" he asked in a throaty voice.

Jim Weatherby whistled. "Why, to think you didn't know all along!" he exclaimed. "It was Fletcher's boy; he made Zebbadee let him take the reins. Fletcher saw it all and he was clean mad when he got here—it took three men to hold him. He thinks more of that boy than he does of his own soul. What's the matter, man, are you hurt?"

Christopher had gone dead white, and the blue circle came out slowly around his mouth. "And I saved him!" he gasped. "I saved him! Isn't there some mistake? Maybe he's dead anyway!"

"Bless you, no," responded Jim, a trifle disconcerted. "The doctor's here and he says it's a case of a broken leg instead of a broken neck, that's all."

Looking about him, Christopher saw that there was another group of men at a little distance, gathered around something that lay still and straight on the grass. The sound of a hoarse groan reached him suddenly—an inarticulate cry of distress—and he felt with a savage joy that it was from Fletcher. He looked down, drawing together his tattered sleeves. For a time he was silent, and when he spoke it was with a sneering laugh.

"Well, I've been a fool, that's all," was what he said.

CHAPTER V. The Glimpse of a Bride

The next morning he awoke with stiffened limbs and confusion in his head, and for a time he lay idly looking at his little window-panes, beyond which the dawn hung like a curtain. Then, as a long finger of sunlight pointed through the glass, he rose with an effort and, dressing himself hastily, went downstairs to breakfast. Here he found that Zebbadee Blake, who had promised to help him cut his crop, had not yet appeared, owing probably to the excitement of Fletcher's runaway. The man's absence annoyed him at first; and then, as the day broke clear and cold, he succumbed to his ever present fear of frost and, taking his pruning-knife from the kitchen mantelpiece, went out alone to begin work on his ripest plants.

The sun had already tempered the morning chill in the air, and the slanting beams stretched over the tobacco, which, as the dew dried, showed a vivid green but faintly tinged with yellow—a colour that even in the sparkling sunlight appeared always slightly shadowed. To attempt alone the cutting of his crop, small as it was, seemed, with his stiffened limbs, a particularly trying task, and for a moment he stood gazing wearily across the field. Presently, with a deliberate movement as if he were stooping to shoulder a fresh burden, he slit the first ripe stalk from its flaunting top to within a hand's-breadth of the ground; then, cutting it half through near the roots, he let it fall to one side, where it hung, slowly wilting, on the earth. Gradually, as he applied himself to the work, the old zest of healthful labour returned to him, and he passed buoyantly through the narrow aisle, leaving a devastated furrow on either side. It was a cheerful picture he presented, when Tucker, dragging himself heavily from the house, came to the ragged edge of the field and sat down on an old moss-grown stump. "Where's Zebbadee, Christopher?" " He didn't turn up. It was that affair of the accident, probably. Fletcher berated him, I reckon." "So you've got to cut it all yourself. Well, it's a first-rate crop—the very primings ought to be as good as some top leaves." "The crop's all right," responded Christopher, as his knife passed with a ripping noise down the juicy stalk. "You know I made a fool of myself yesterday, Uncle Tucker," he said suddenly, drawing back when the plant fell slowly across the furrow, "and I'm so stiff in the joints this morning I can hardly move. I met one of Fletcher's farm wagons running away, with his boy dragged by the reins, and—I stopped it." Tucker turned his mild blue eyes upon him. Since the news of Appomattox nothing had surprised him, and he was not surprised now—he was merely interested. "You couldn't have helped it, I suspect," he remarked.

"I didn't know whose it was, you see," answered Christopher; "the horses were new." "You'd have done it anyway, I reckon. At such moments it's a man's mettle that counts, you know, and not his emotions. You might have hated Fletcher ten times worse, but you'd have risked your life to stop the horses all the same— because, after all, what a man is is something different from how he feels about things. It's in your blood to dare everything whenever a chance offers, as it was in your father's before you. Why, I've seen him stop on the way to a ball, pull off his coat, and go up a burning ladder to save a woman's pet canary, and then, when the crowd hurrahed him, I've laughed because I knew he deserved nothing of the kind. With him it wasn't courage so much as his inborn love of violent action—it cleared his head, he used to say." Christopher stopped cutting, straightened himself, and held his knife loosely in his hand. "That's about it, I reckon," he returned. "I know I'm not a bit of a hero—if I'd been in your place I'd have shown up long ago for a skulking coward—but it's the excitement of the moment that I like. Why, there's nothing in life I'd enjoy so much as knocking Fletcher down—it's one of the things I look forward to that makes it all worth while." Tucker laughed softly. It was a peculiarity of his never to disapprove. That's a good savage instinct," he said, with a humorous tremor of his nostrils, "and it's a saying of mine, you know, that a man is never really—civilised until he has turned fifty. We're all born mighty near to the wolf and mighty far from the dog, and it takes a good many years to coax the wild beast to lie quiet by the fireside. It's the struggle that the Lord wants, I reckon; and anyhow, He makes it easier for us as the years go on. When a man gets along past his fiftieth year, he begins to understand that there are few things worth bothering about, and the sins of his fellow mortals are not among 'em." " Bless my soul!" exclaimed Christopher in disgust, rapping his palm smartly with the flat blade of his knife. "Do you mean to tell me you've actually gone and forgiven Bill Fletcher?" "Well, I wouldn't go so far as to water the grass on his grave, "answered Tucker, still smiling, "but I've not the slightest objection to his eating, sleeping, and moving on the surface of the earth. There's room enough for us both, even in this little county, and so long as he keeps out of my sight, as far as I am concerned he absolutely doesn't exist. I never think of him except when you happen to call his name. If a man steals my money, that's his affair. I can't afford to let him steal my peace of mind as well." With a groan Christopher went back to his work. "It may be sense you're talking," he observed, "but it sounds to me like pure craziness. It's just as well, either way, I reckon, that I'm not in your place and you in mine—for if that were so Fletcher would most likely go scot free." Tucker rose unsteadily from the stump. "Why, if we stood in each other's boots, "he said, with a gentle chuckle, "or, to be exact, if I stood in your two boots and you in my one, as sure as fate, you'd be thinking my way and I yours. Well, I wish I could help you, but as I can't I'll be moving slowly back."

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

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

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

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

"I fear you've got an entirely wrong idea about me, "he answered. "It was nothing in the world to make a fuss over—and I swear to you if it were the last word I ever spoke—I did not know it was your brother."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Will you be alone?"

"Oh, no."

"Who goes with you?" he insisted bluntly.

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

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

His lack of gallantry was churlish.

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

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

He swept the jest impatiently aside.

"Why do you do it?" he demanded.

"Do what?"

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

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

"Why do I marry him?" She drew a step away, looking at sky and field. "Why do I marry him?" She hesitated slightly, "Oh, for many reasons, and all good ones—but most of all because I love him."

"You do not love him."

"I beg your pardon, but I do."

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

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

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

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

"What an awful wish!" she exclaimed lightly.

"It's an honest one."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"When?"

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

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

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

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

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

For an instant her eyes dwelt upon him very kindly.

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

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

"I must say you ruined this yesterday," she remarked, looking up from her needle, "and if you'd listened to me you could have stopped those horses just as well in your old jean clothes. I had a feeling that something was going to happen, when I saw you with this on."

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI. Shows Fletcher in a New Light

Responding to a much-distracted telegram from Fletcher, Carraway arrived at the Hall early on the morning of Maria's marriage, to arrange for the transfer to the girl of her smaller share in her grandfather's wealth. In the reaction following the hysterical excitement over the accident, Fletcher had grown doubly solicitous about the future of the boy—feeling, apparently, that the value of his heir was increased by his having so nearly lost him. When Carraway found him he was bustling noisily about the sick-room, walking on tiptoe with a tramp that shook the floor, while Will lay gazing wearily at the sunlight which filtered through the bright green shutters. Somewhere in the house a canary was trilling joyously, and the cheerful sound lent a pleasant animation to the otherwise depressing atmosphere. On his way upstairs Carraway had met Maria running from the boy's room, with her hair loose upon her shoulders, and she had stopped long enough to show a smiling face on the subject of her marriage. There were to be only Fletcher, Miss Saidie and himself as witnesses, he gathered, Wyndham's parents having held somewhat aloof from the connection—and within three hours at the most it would be over and the bridal pair beginning their long journey. Looking down from the next landing, he had further assurance of the sincerity of Maria's smile when he saw the lovers meet and embrace within the shadow of the staircase; and the sight stirred within his heart something of that wistful pity with which those who have learned how little emotion counts in life watch the first exuberance of young passion. A bright beginning whatever be the ending, he thought a little sadly, as he turned the handle of the sick-room door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ah, that's it," agreed Fletcher, catching readily at the

suggestion. "You jest turn right over and take yo' nap, and when you wake up well, I'll give you anything you want. Here, swallow this stuff down quick and you'll sleep easy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy still hesitated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning presently into the sunken road by the ice-pond, he came in a little while to the overgrown fence surrounding the Blake farm. In the tobacco field beyond the garden he saw Christopher's blue-clad figure rising from a blur of green, and, following the ragged path amid the yarrow, he joined the young man where he stood at work.

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

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

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

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

Christopher shook his head, and, kneeling on the ground, carelessly sorted his pile of plants. "I learned to cure it indoors," he answered, and I reckon I'll keep to the old way. The dark leaf is what the people about here like—it makes the sweeter chew, they think. As for me, I hate the very smell of it." "That's odd, and I'll wager you're the only man in the county who neither smokes nor chews." "Oh, I handle it, you see. The smell and the stain of it are well soaked in. I sometimes wonder if all the water in the river of Jordan could wash away the blood of the tobacco worm." With a laugh in which there was more bitterness than mirth, he stretched out his big bronzed hands, and Carraway saw that the nails and finger-tips were dyed bright green. "It does leave its mark," observed the lawyer, and felt instantly that the speech was inane. Christopher went on quietly with his work, gathering up the plants and hanging the slit stalks over the long poles, while the peculiar heavy odour of the freshly cut crop floated unpleasantly about them. For a time Carraway watched him in silence, his eyes dwelling soberly upon the stalwart figure. In spite of himself, the mere beauty of outline touched him with a feeling of sadness, and when he spoke at last it was in a lowered tone. "You have, perhaps, surmised that my call is not entirely one of pleasure," he began awkwardly; "that I am, above all, the bearer of a message from Mr. Fletcher." "From Fletcher?" repeated Christopher coolly. "Well, I never heard a message of his yet that wasn't better left undelivered." "I am sure I am correct in saying," Carraway went on steadily and not without definite purpose, "that he hopes you will be generous enough to let bygones be bygones." Christopher nodded. "He feels, of course," pursued the lawyer, "that his obligation to you is greater than he can hope to repay. Indeed, I think if you knew the true state of the case your judgment of him would be softened. The boy—who so nearly lost his life is the one human being whom Fletcher loves better than himself—better than his own soul, I had almost said."

Christopher looked up attentively. "Who'd have thought it," he muttered beneath his breath. Judging that he had at last made a beginning at the plastering over of old scars, Carraway went on as if the other had not spoken. "So jealous is his affection in this instance, that I believe his granddaughter's marriage is something of a relief to him. He is positively impatient of any influence over the boy except his own—and that, I fear, is hardly for good." Picking up a clod of earth, Christopher crumbled it slowly to dust. "So the little chap comes in for all this, does he?" he asked, as his gaze swept over the wide fields in the distance. "He comes in for all that is mine by right, and Fletcher's intention is, I dare say, that he'll reflect honour upon the theft?" "That he'll reflect honour upon the name—yes. It is the ambition of his grandfather, I believe, that the lad should grow up to be respected in the county—to stand for something more than he himself has done." "Well, he'll hardly stand for more of a rascal," remarked Christopher quietly; and then, as his eyes rested on the landscape, he appeared to follow moodily some suggestion which had half escaped him. "Then the way to touch the man is through the boy, I presume," he said abruptly.

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

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

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

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

He finished a little wistfully, and stood looking up at the young man who towered a good head and shoulders above him.

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

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

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

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

VII. In Which Hero and Villain Appear as One

A month later Christopher's conversation with Carraway returned to him, when, coming one morning from the house with his dogs at his heels and his squirrel gun on his shoulder, he found Will Fletcher and a troop of spotted foxhound puppies awaiting him outside the whitewashed gate.

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

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

"I don't see why you hate me so," said the boy wonderingly, checking the too frolicsome adventures of the puppies in the direction of the hounds. "I've always liked you, you know, even before you saved my life—because you're the straightest shot and the best trainer of hounds about here. Grandpa says I mustn't have anything to do with you, but I will anyway, if I please."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He keeps a pretty close watch over you, I reckon. Perhaps he's afraid you'll become a man and step into his shoes before he knows it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy stood midway of the road, kicking the dust impatiently ahead of him. His lips quivered with disappointment, and the expression gave them a singularly wistful beauty. "I'll give you all my pocket money if you'll take me with you," he pleaded suddenly, stretching out a handful of silver.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll teach you, perhaps."

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

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

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

"I dare say. What of it?"

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

Christopher nodded.

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

Christopher turned and looked at him suddenly. "What would you say to going 'possum hunting one night?" he asked in a queer voice.

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

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

"I should say so!"

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

"Oh, I'm man enough by now."

"Not according to your grandfather's thinking."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher handed him the gun, and they went on rapidly along the old road under the honey locusts that grew beyond the bend. They were nearing the place where Christopher, as a child of twelve, had waited with his birdgun in the bushes to shoot Fletcher when he came in sight, and now as the recollection returned to him he unconsciously slackened his pace and cast his eyes about for the spot where he had stood. It was all there just as it had been that morning—the red clumps of sumach covered with gray dust, the dried underbrush piled along the fence, and the brown honeyshucks strewn in the sunny road. For the first time in his life he was glad at this instant that he had not killed Fletcher then—that his hand had been stayed that day to fall the heavier, it might be, at the appointed time. The boy still chatted eagerly, and when presently the hounds scented a rabbit in the sassafras beyond the fence, he started with a shout at the heels of the pursuing pack. Swinging himself over the brushwood, Christopher followed slowly across the waste of lifeeverlasting, tearing impatiently through the flowering net which the wild potato vine cast about his feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VIII. Between the Devil and the Deep Sea

There was a cheerful blaze in the old lady's parlour, and she was sitting placidly in her Elizabethan chair, the yellow cat dozing at her footstool. Lila paced slowly up and down the room, her head bent a little sideways, as she listened to Tucker's cheerful voice reading the evening chapter from the family Bible. His crutch, still strapped to his right shoulder, trailed behind him on the floor, and the smoky oil lamp threw his eccentric shadow on the whitewashed wall, where it hung grimacing like a grotesque from early Gothic art.

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

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

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

"Oh, no, mother."

"Well, we mustn't take the Scriptures literally, you know, my child; if we did, I fear a great deal of trouble would come of it—and surely it is a pity to magnify the passion of love when so very many estimable persons get along quite comfortably without it. You remember my remarking how happy Miss Belinda Morrison always appeared to be, and so far as I know she never had a suitor in her life, though she lived to be upward of eighty."

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

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

Lila flushed and bit her lip.

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

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

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

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

The young man came in and crossed slowly to the fire, bending for an instant over her chair. He was conscious suddenly that his clothes smelled of the fields and that the cold water of the well had not cleansed his face and hands. All at once it came to him with something of a shock that this bare, refined poverty was beyond his level—that about himself there was a coarseness, a brutality even, that made him shrink from contact with these others—with his mother, with Lila, with poor, maimed Tucker in his cotton suit. Was it only a distinction in manner, he wondered resentfully, or did the difference lie still deeper in some unlikeness of soul? For the first time in his life he felt ill at ease in the presence of those he loved, and as his eyes dwelt moodily on Lila's graceful figure—upon the swell of her low bosom, her swaying hips, and the free movement of her limbs—he asked himself bitterly if he had aught in common with so delicate and rare a thing? And she? Was her blithe acquiescence, after all, but an assumed virtue, to whose outward rags she clung? Was it possible that there was here no inward rebellion, none of that warfare against Destiny which at once inspirited and embittered his heart?

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

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

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

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

"Now, now, Boaz, don't be putting any ideas against marriage in his head," broke in the old lady. "He has remained single too long as it is, for, as dear old Bishop Deane used to say, it is surely the duty of every gentleman to take upon himself the provision of at least one helpless female. Not that I wish you to enter into marriage hastily, my son, or for any merely sentimental reasons; but I am sure, as things are, I believe one may have a great many trials even if one remains single, and though I know, of course, that I've had my share of trouble, still I never blamed your poor father one instant—not even for the loss of my six children, which certainly would not have happened if I had not married him. But, as I've often told you, my dear, I think marriage should be rightly regarded more as a duty than as a pleasure. Your Aunt Susannah always said it was like choosing a partner at a ball; for my part, I think it resembles more the selecting of a brand of flour."

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

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

Christopher leaned over her and held out his arms.

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

Once in his room, he threw off his coat and sat down upon the side of his narrow bed, glancing contemptuously at his bare brown arms, which showed through the openings in his blue shirt sleeves. He was still smarting from the memory of the sudden selfconsciousness he had felt downstairs, and a pricking sensitiveness took possession of him, piercing like needles through the boorish indifference he had worn. All at once he realised that he was ashamed of himself—ashamed of his ignorance, his awkwardness, his brutality—and with the shame there awoke the slow anger of a sullen beast. Fate had driven him like a whipped hound to the kennel, but he could still snarl back his defiance from the shadow of his obscurity. The strong masculine beauty of his face—the beauty, as Cynthia had said, of the young David—confronted him in the little greenish mirror above the bureau, and in the dull misery of the eyes he read those higher possibilities, which even to-day he could not regard without a positive pang. What he might have been seemed forever struggling in his look with what he was, like the Scriptural wrestle between the angel of the Lord and the brute. The soul, distorted, bruised, defeated, still lived within him, and it was this that brought upon him those hours of mortal anguish which he had so vainly tried to drown in his glass. From the mirror his gaze passed to his red and knotted hand, with its blunted nails, and the straight furrow grew deeper between his eyebrows. He remembered suddenly that his earliest ambition—the ambition of his childhood—had been that of a gentlemanly scholar of the old order. He had meant to sit in a library and read Horace, or to complete the laborious translation of the "Iliad" which his father had left unfinished. Then his studies had ended abruptly with the Greek alphabet, and from the library he had passed out to the plough. In the years of severe physical labour which followed he had felt the spirit of the student go out of him forever, and after a few winter nights, when he fell asleep over his books, he had sunk slowly to the level of the small tobacco growers among whom he lived. With him also was the curse of apathy—that hereditary instinct to let the single throw decide the issue, so characteristic of the reckless Blakes. For more than two hundred years his people had been gay and careless livers on this very soil; among them all he knew of not one who had gone without the smallest of his desires, nor of one who had permitted his left hand to learn what his right one cast away. Big, blithe, mettlesome, they passed before him in a long, comely line, flushed with the pleasant follies which had helped to sap the courage in their descendants' veins.

At first he had made a pitiable attempt to remain "within his class," but gradually, as time went on, this, too, had left him, and in the end he had grown to feel a certain pride in the ignorance he had formerly despised—a clownish scorn of anything above the rustic details of his daily life. There were days even when he took a positive pleasure in the degree of his abasement, when but for his blind mother he would have gone dirty, spoken in dialect, and eaten with the hounds. What he dreaded most now were the rare moments of illumination in which he beheld his degradation by a blaze of light—moments such as this when he seemed to stand alone upon the edge of the world, with the devil awaiting him when he should turn at last. Years ago he had escaped these periods by strong physical exertion, working sometimes in the fields until he dropped upon the earth and lay like a log for hours. Later, he had yielded to drink when the darkness closed over him, and upon several occasions he had sat all night with a bottle of whisky in Tom Spade's store. Both methods he felt now to be ineffectual; fatigue could not deaden nor could whisky drown the bitterness of his soul. One thing remained, and that was to glut his hatred until it should lie quiet like a gorged beast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Cynthia had gone, he undressed and threw himself on the bed, but there was a queer stinging sensation in his veins, and he could not sleep. Rising presently, he opened the window, and in the frosty October air stood looking through the darkness to the light that twinkled in the direction of Blake Hall. Faint stars were shining overhead, and against the indistinct horizon something obscure and black was dimly outlined—perhaps the great clump of oaks that surrounded the old brick walls. Somewhere by that glimmer of light he knew that Fletcher sat hugging his ambition like a miser, gloating over the grandson who would grow up to redeem his name. For the weak, foolish-mouthed boy Christopher at this moment knew neither tolerance nor compassion; and if he stooped to touch him, he felt that it was merely as he would grasp a stick which Fletcher had taken for his own defense. The boy himself might live or die, prosper or fail, it made little difference. The main thing was that in the end Bill Fletcher should be hated by his grandson as he was hated by the man whom he had wronged.

CHAPTER IX. As the Twig is Bent

It was two weeks after this that Fletcher, looking up from his coffee and cakes one morning, demanded querulously "Whar's Will, Saidie? It seems to me he sleeps late these days."

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

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

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

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

"I don't like it; I don't like it," protested Fletcher; "those Blakes are as mad as bulldogs, and they've been so as far back as I can remember. The sooner a stop's put to this thing the better it'll be. How long has it been going on, I wonder?" "About ten days, I believe, and it does seem to give the boy such an interest. I can't help feeling it's a pity to break it up."

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