CHAPTER I
In Which A Stranger Appears

ON a bright June morning, when Ordway had been more than two years at Tappahannock, he came out upon Mrs. Twine's little porch as soon as breakfast was over, and looked down the board walk for Harry Banks, who had fallen into the habit of accompanying him to the warehouse. From where he stood, under the hanging blossoms of the locust trees, he could see the painted tin roofs and the huddled chimneys of the town, flanked by the brazen sweep of the cornfields along the country roads. As his eyes rested on the familiar scene, they softened unconsciously with an affection which was almost paternal—for in the last two years Tappahannock had become a different place from the Tappahannock he had entered as a tramp on that windy afternoon in March. The town as it stood to-day was the town which he had helped to make, and behind each roll of progress there had been the informing purpose of his mind, as well as the strength of his shoulder at the wheel. Behind the law which had closed the disreputable barrooms; behind the sentiment for decency which had purified the filthy hollows; behind the spirit of charity which had organised and opened, not only a reading room for the factory workers, but an industrial home for the poorer classes—behind each of these separate movements there had been a single energy to plan and act. In two years he had watched the little town cover the stretch of ten years' improvement; in two years he had aroused and vitalised the community into which he had come a stranger. Tappahannock was the child of his brain—the life that was in her to-day he had given her out of himself, and the love he felt for her was the love that one bestows upon one's own. Standing there his eyes followed the street to the ugly brick church at the corner, and then as his mental vision travelled down the long, hot hill which led to the railroad, he could tell himself, with a kind of exultation, that there was hardly a dwelling along the way which had not some great or little reason to bless his name. Even Kelly, whose saloon he had closed, had been put upon his feet again and started, with a fair chance, in the tobacco market. Yes, a new life had been given him, and he had made good his promise to himself. The clothes he wore to-day were as rough as those in which he had chopped wood in Bullfinch's Hollow; the room he lived in was the same small, bare lodging of Mrs. Twine's; for though his position at Baxter's now assured him a comfortable income, he had kept to his cramped manner of life in order that he might contribute the more generously to the lives of others. Out of his little he had given abundantly, and he had gained in return the happiness which he had ceased to make the object of his search. In looking back over his whole life, he could honestly tell himself that his happiest years since childhood were the ones that he had spent in Tappahannock.

The gate closed with a slam, and Banks came up the short brick walk inside, mopping his heated face with a pink bordered handkerchief.

"I'm a minute late," he said, "but it doesn't matter, does it? The Trends asked me to breakfast."

"It doesn't matter in the least if you spent that minute with Milly," replied Ordway, with a laugh, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe and descended the steps. "The hot weather has come early, hasn't it?"

"Oh, we're going in for a scorcher," responded Banks, indifferently. There was a heavy gloom in his manner which was hardly to be accounted for by the temperature in which he moved, and as they closed the gate behind them and passed under the shade of the locust trees on the board walk, he turned to Ordway in an outburst which was little short of desperation.

"I don't know how it is—or whether it's just a woman's way," he said, "but I never can be sure of Milly for ten minutes at a time. A month ago I was positive that she meant to marry me in the autumn, but now I'm in a kind of blue funk about her doing it at all. She's never been the same since she went North in April."

"My dear chap, these things will vary, I suppose—though, mind you, I make no claim to exact knowledge of the sex."

"It isn't the sex," said Banks, "it's Milly."

"Well, I certainly can't claim any particular knowledge of Milly. It would be rather presumptuous if I did, considering I've only seen her about a dozen times—mostly at a distance."

"I wish you knew her better, perhaps you could help me," returned Banks in a voice of melancholy. "To save the life of me I don't see how it is—I've done my best—I swear I've done my best—yet nothing somehow seems to suit her. She wants to make me over from the skin and even that doesn't satisfy her. When my hair is short she wants it long, and when it's long she says she wants it short. She can't stand me in coloured cravats and when I put on a black tie she calls me an undertaker. I had to leave off my turtle-dove scarf-pin and this morning," he rolled his innocent blue eyes, like pale marbles, in the direction of Ordway, "she actually got into a temper about my stockings."

"It seems to be a case for sympathy," commented Ordway seriously, "but hardly, I should say, for marriage. Imagine, my dear Banks, what a hell you'd make out of your domesticity. Suppose you give her up and bear it like a man?"

"Give her up? to what?"

"Well, to her own amiability, we'll say."

"I can't," said Banks, waving his pink bordered handkerchief before his face in an effort either to disperse the swarming blue flies or to conceal the working of his emotion. "I'd die—I'd kill myself—that's the awful part of it. The more she bangs me over the head, the more I feel that I can't live without her. Is that natural, do you s'pose?" he inquired uneasily, "or have I gone clean crazy?"

Checking his smile severely, Ordway turned and slipped his left arm affectionately through his companion's.

"I've heard of similar cases," he remarked, "though I confess, they sounded a little strained."

"Do you think I'd better see a doctor? I will if you say so."

"By no means. Go off on a trip."

"And leave Milly here? I'd jump out of the train—and, I reckon, she'd bang my head off for doing it."

"But if it's as bad as that, you couldn't be much more miserable without her."

"I know it," replied Banks obstinately, "but it would be a different sort of miserableness, and that happens to be the sort that I can't stand."

"Then I give it up," said Ordway, cheerfully, "there's no hope but marriage."

With his words they turned under the archway of Baxter's warehouse, and Banks's passionate confidences were extinguished in the odour of tobacco.

A group of men stood talking loudly in the centre of the building, and as Ordway approached, Baxter broke away, with his great rolling laugh, and came to join him at the door of his private office.

"Catesby and Frazier have got into a squabble about that lot of tobacco they brought in last February," he said, "and they have both agreed to accept your decision in the matter."

Ordway nodded, without replying, as he followed the other through the doorway. Such judicial appeals to him were not uncommon, and his power of pacification, as his employer had once remarked, was one of his principal qualifications for the tobacco market.

"Shall I hear them now? or would it be as well to give them time to cool off?" he asked presently, while Baxter settled his great person in a desk chair that seemed a size too small to contain it.

"If they can cool off on a day like this they're lucky dogs," returned Baxter, with a groan, "however, I reckon you might as well get it over and let 'em go home and stew in peace. By the way, Smith, I forgot to tell you that Major Leary—he's the president of the Southside Bank, you know, was asking me yesterday if I could tell him anything about you before you came to work for me."

"Of the Southside Bank," repeated Ordway, while his hand closed tightly over a paper weight, representing a gambolling kitten, which lay on Baxter's desk. With the words he was conscious only of the muffled drumming of his pulses, and above the discord in his ears, the cheerful tones of Baxter sounded like an echo rather than a real voice. At the instant he was back again in his room in the great banking house of Amos, Bonner & Amos, in the midst of the pale brown walls, the black oak furniture and the shining leather covered volumes behind the glass doors of the bookcases. With peculiar vividness he remembered the eccentric little bird on the bronze clock on the mantel, which had hopped from its swinging perch to strike the hour with its beak; and through the open windows he could hear still the din of traffic in the street below and the ceaseless, irregular tread of footsteps upon the pavement.

"Oh, I didn't mean to raise your hopes too high," remarked Baxter, rising from his chair to slap him affectionately upon the shoulder, "he isn't going to make you president of the bank, but of the Citizen's Improvement League, whose object is to oust Jasper Trend, you know, in the autumn. The Major told me before he left that you'd done as much for Tappahannock in two years as any other man had done in a lifetime. I said I thought he'd hit the nail pretty squarely, which is something he doesn't generally manage to do."

"So I'm to fight Jasper Trend, am I?" asked Ordway, with sudden interest. The sound of his throbbing arteries was no longer in his ears, and as he spoke, he felt that his past life with his old identity had departed from him. In the swift renewal of his confidence he had become again "Ten Commandment Smith" of Tappahannock.

"Well, you see, Jasper has been a precious bad influence around here," pursued Baxter, engrossed in the political scheme he was unfolding. "The only thing on earth he's got to recommend him is his pretty daughter. Now, I've a soft enough heart, as everybody knows, when the ladies come about—particularly if they're pretty—but I'm ready to stand up and say that Jasper Trend can't be allowed to run this town on the platform of pure chivalry. There's such a thing as fairness, suh, even where women are concerned, and I'll back my word with my oath that it ain't fair!"

"And I'll back your word with another that it isn't," rejoined Ordway.

"There's no doubt, I reckon," continued Baxter, "that Jasper has connived with those disorderly saloons that you've been trying to shut up, and for all his money and the men he employs in the cotton mills there's come a considerable reaction against him in public sentiment. Now, I ain't afraid to say, Smith," he concluded with an ample flourish of his dirty hand, "that the fact that there's any public sentiment at all in Tappahannock is due to you. Until you came here there weren't six decent men you could count mixed up in the affairs of this town. Jasper had everything his own way, that's why he hates you."

"But I wasn't even aware that he did me so much honour."

"You mean he hasn't told you his feelings to your face. Well, he hasn't gone so far as to confide them to me either—but even if I ain't a woman, I can hear some things that ain't spoke out in words. He's made a dirty town and you're sweepin' it clean—do you think it likely that it makes him love you?"

"He's welcome to feel about me anyway he pleases, but do you know, Baxter," he added with his whimsical gravity, "I've a pretty strong conviction that I'd make a jolly good street sweeper."

"I reckon you're right!" roared Baxter, "and when you're done, we'll shoot off some sky-rockets over the job—so there you are, ain't you?"

"All right—but there's Jasper Trend also," retorted Ordway.

"Oh, he can afford to send off his own sky-rockets. We needn't bother about him. He won't be out of a job like Kelly, you know. Great Scott!" he added, chuckling, "I can see your face now when you marched in here the day after you closed Kelly's saloon, and told me you had to start a man in tobacco because you'd taken him out of whiskey."

His laugh shook through his figure until Ordway saw his fat chest heave violently beneath his alpaca coat. Custom had made the younger man almost indifferent to the external details which had once annoyed him in his employer, and he hardly noticed now that Baxter's coat was turning from black to green and that the old ashes from his pipe had lodged in the crumpled bosom of his shirt. Baxter was—well, Baxter, and tolerance was a virtue which one acquired sooner or later in Tappahannock.

"I suppose I might as well get at Catesby and Frazier now," remarked Ordway, watching the other disinter a tattered palm leaf fan from beneath a dusty pile of old almanacs and catalogues.

"Wait a minute first," said Baxter, "there's something I want to say as soon as I get settled. I ain't made for heat, that's certain," he pursued, as he pulled off his coat, and hung it from a nail in the wall, "it sweats all my morals out of me."

Detaching the collar from his shirt, he placed it above his coat on the nail, and then rolling up his shirt sleeves, sank, with a panting breath, back into his chair.

"If I were you I'd get out of this at night anyway, Smith," he urged. "Why don't you try boarding for the next few months over at Cedar Hill. It would be a godsend to the family, now that Miss Emily's school has stopped."

"But I don't suppose they'd take me in," replied Ordway, staring out into the street, where the dust rose like steam in the air, and the rough-coated country horses toiled patiently up the long hill. Across the way he saw the six stale currant buns and the three bottles of pale beer behind the fly-specked window panes of a cheap eating house. In front of them, a Negro woman, barefooted, with her ragged calico dress tucked up about her waist, was sousing the steaming board walk with a pailful of dirty water. From his memory of two years ago there floated the mingled odours of wild flowers and freshly turned earth in the garden of Cedar Hill, and Emily appeared in his thoughts only as an appropriate figure against the pleasant natural background of the lilacs and the meadows. In the past year he had seen her hardly more than a dozen times—mere casual glimpses for the most part—and he had almost forgotten his earlier avoidance of her, which had resulted from an instinctive delicacy rather than from any premeditated purpose. His judgment had told him that he had no right to permit a woman to become his friend in ignorance of his past; and at the same time he was aware of a terrible shrinking from intruding his old self, however remotely, into the new life at Tappahannock. When the choice came between confessing his sin and sacrificing the chance acquaintance, he had found it easier simply to keep away from her actual presence. Yet his interest in her had been so closely associated with his larger feeling for humanity, that he could tell himself with sincerity that it was mere folly which put her forward as an objection to his boarding for the summer at Cedar Hill.

"The truth is," admitted Baxter, after a pause, "that Mrs. Brooke spoke to me about having to take a boarder or two, when I went out there to pay Mr. Beverly for that tobacco I couldn't sell."

"So you bought it in the end," laughed Ordway, "as you did last year after sending me out there on a mission?"

"Yes, I bought it," replied Baxter, blushing like a boy under the beads of perspiration upon his face. "I may as well confess it, though I tried to keep it secret. But I ask you as man to man," he demanded warmly, "was there another blessed thing on God's earth for me to do?"

"Let Mr. Beverly go about his business—that's what I'd have done."

"Oh, no, you wouldn't," protested Baxter softly, "not when he'd ruin himself for you to-morrow if you were to walk out and ask him."

"But he couldn't," insisted Ordway with the brutality of the naked fact, "he did that little job on his own account too long ago."

"But that ain't the point, Smith," replied Baxter in an awed and solemn accent. "The point ain't that he couldn't, but that he would. As I make it out that's the point which has cost me money on him for the last thirty years."

"Oh, well, I suppose it's a charity like any other, only the old fool is so pompous about his poverty that it wears me out."

"It does at Tappahannock, but it won't when you get out to Cedar Hill, that's the difference between Mr. Beverly in the air and Mr. Beverly in the flesh. The one wears you out, the other rests you for all his darnation foolishness. Now, you can board out there for twenty-five dollars a month and put a little ready money where it ought to be in Mrs. Brooke's pocket."

"Of course I'd like it tremendously," said Ordway, after a moment in which the perfume of the lilacs filled his memory. "It would be like stepping into heaven after that stifling little room under the tin roof at Mrs. Twine's. Do you know I slept out in the fields every hot night last summer?"

"You see you ain't a native of these parts," remarked Baxter with a large resigned movement of his palm leaf fan, "and your skin ain't thick enough to keep out the heat. I'll speak to 'em at Cedar Hill this very day, and if you like, I reckon, you can move out at the beginning of the week. I hope if you do, Smith, that you'll bear with Mr. Beverly. There's nothing in the universe that he wouldn't do for me if he had the chance. It ain't his fault, you see, that he's never had it."

"Oh, I promise you I'll bear with him," laughed Ordway, as he left the office and went out into the warehouse.

The knot of men was still in the centre of the building, and as Ordway walked down the long floor in search of Catesby and Frazier, he saw that a stranger had drifted in during his half hour in Baxter's office. With his first casual glance all that he observed of the man was a sleek fair head, slightly bald in the centre, and a pair of abnormally flat shoulders in a light gray coat, which had evidently left a clothing shop only a day or two before. Then as Frazier—a big, loud voiced planter—turned toward him with the exclamation, "here's Smith, himself, now!"—he saw the stranger wheel round abruptly and give vent the next instant to a sharp whistle of surprise.

"Well, I'll be damned!" he said.

For a minute the tobacco dust filled Ordway's throat and nostrils, and he felt that he was stifling for a breath of air. The dim length of the warehouse and the familiar shadowy figures of the planters receded before his eyes, and he saw again the bare walls of the prison chapel, with the rows of convicts seated in the pale, greenish light. With his recognition of the man before him, it seemed to him suddenly that the last year in Tappahannock was all a lie. The prison walls, the grated windows, and the hard benches of the shoe shop were closer realities than were the open door of the warehouse and the free, hot streets of the little town.

"I am very happy to meet you, Mr. Smith," said the stranger, as he held out his hand with a good-humoured smile.

"I beg your pardon," returned Ordway quietly, "but I did not catch your name."

At the handshake a chill mounted from his finger tips to his shoulder, but drawing slightly away he stood his ground without so much as the perceptible flicker of an eyelash.

"My name is Brown—Horatio Brown, very much at your service," answered the other, with a manner like that of a successful, yet obsequious commercial traveller.

It was on Ordway's tongue to retort: "You lie—it's Gus Wherry!"—but checking the impulse with a frown, he turned on his heel and asked the two men for whom he was looking to come with him to settle their disagreement in Baxter's office. As he moved down the building an instant later, it was with an effort that he kept his gaze fixed straight ahead through the archway, for he was aware that every muscle in his body pricked him to turn back and follow Wherry to the end. That the man would be forced, in self-defence, to keep his secret for a time at least, he had caught in the smiling insolence of his glance; but that it was possible to enter into a permanent association or even a treaty with Gus Wherry, he knew to be a supposition that was utterly beyond the question. The crime for which the man had been sentenced he could not remember; but he had a vague recollection that something morbidly romantic in his history had combined with his handsome face to give him an ephemeral notoriety as the Adonis of imaginative shop-girls. Even in prison Wherry had attained a certain prominence because of his beauty, which at the time when Ordway first saw him had been conspicuous in spite of his convict's clothes. In the years since then his athletic figure had grown a trifle too heavy, and his fair hair had worn a little thin on the crown of his head; yet these slight changes of time had left him, Ordway admitted reluctantly, still handsome in the brawny, full-blooded style, which had generally made fools of women. His lips were still as red, his features as severely classic, and his manner was not less vulgar, and quite as debonnair as in the days when the newspapers had clamoured for his pictures. Even the soft, girlish cleft in his smooth-shaven chin, Ordway remembered now, with a return of the instinctive aversion with which it had first inspired him. Yet he was obliged to confess, as he walked ahead of Catesby and Frazier down the dusty floor of the warehouse, that if Wherry had been less of an uncompromising rascal, he would probably have made a particularly amiable acquaintance.

CHAPTER II
Ordway Compromises With The Past

WHEN Ordway came out of Baxter's office, he found that Gus Wherry had left the warehouse, but the effect upon him of the man's appearance in Tappahannock was not to be overcome by the temporary withdrawal of his visible presence. Not only the town, but existence itself seemed altered, and in a way polluted, by the obtrusion of Wherry's personality upon the scene. Though he was not in the building, Ordway felt an angry conviction that he was in the air. It was impossible to breathe freely lest he might by accident draw in some insidious poison which would bring him under the influence of his past life and of Gus Wherry.

As he went along the street at one o'clock to his dinner at Mrs. Twine's, he was grateful for the intensity of the sun, which rendered him, while he walked in it, almost incapable of thought. There was positive relief in the fact that he must count the uneven lengths of board walk which it was necessary for him to traverse, and the buzzing of the blue flies before his face forced his attention, at the minute, from the inward to the outward disturbance.

When he reached the house, Mrs. Twine met him at the door and led him, with an inquiry as to his susceptibility to sunstroke, into the awful gloom of her tightly shuttered parlour.

"I declar' you do look well nigh in yo' last gasp," she remarked cheerfully, bustling into the dining-room for a palm leaf fan. "Thar, now, come right in an' set down an' eat yo' dinner. Hot or cold, glad or sorry, I never saw the man yit that could stand goin' without his dinner at the regular hour. Sech is the habit in some folks that I remember when old Mat Fawling's second wife died he actually hurried up her funeral an hour earlier so as to git back in time for dinner. 'It ain't that I'm meanin' any disrespect to Sary, Mrs. Twine,' he said to me right whar I was layin' her out, 'but the truth is that I can't even mourn on an empty stomach. The undertaker put it at twelve,' he said, 'but I reckon we might manage to git out to the cemetery by eleven.'"

"All the same if you'll give me a slice of bread and a glass of milk, I'll take it standing," remarked Ordway. "I'm sorry to leave you, Mrs. Twine, even for a few months," he added, "but I think I'll try to get board outside the town until the summer is over."

"Well, I'll hate to lose you, suh, to be sure," responded Mrs. Twine, dealing out the fried batter with a lavish hand despite his protest, "for I respect you as a fellow mortal, though I despise you as a sex."

Her hard eyes softened as she looked at him; but his gaze was on the walnut coloured oilcloth, where the flies dispersed lazily before the waving elm branch in the hands of the small Negro, and so he did not observe the motherly tenderness which almost beautified her shrewish face.

"You've been very kind to me," he said, as he put his glass and plate down, and turned toward the door. "Whatever happens I shall always remember you and the children with pleasure."

She choked violently, and looking back at the gasping sound, he saw that her eyes had filled suddenly with tears. Lifting a corner of her blue gingham apron, she mopped her face in a furious effort to conceal the cause of her unaccustomed emotion.

"I declar' I'm all het up;" she remarked in an indignant voice, "but if you should ever need a friend in sickness, Mr. Smith," she added, after a moment in which she choked and coughed under the shelter of her apron, "you jest send for me an' I'll drop every thing I've got an' go. I'll leave husband an' children without a thought, suh, an' thar's nothin' I won't do for you with pleasure, from makin' a mustard plaster to layin' out yo' corpse. When I'm a friend, I'm a friend, if I do say it, an' you've had a way with me from the very first minute that I clapped eyes upon you. 'He may not have sech calves as you've got,' was what I said to Bill, 'but he's got a manner of his own, an' I reckon it's the manner an' not the calves that is the man.' Not that I'm meaning any slur on yo' shape, suh," she hastened to explain.

"Well, I'll come to see you now and then," said Ordway, smiling, "and I shan't forget to take the children for a picnic as I promised." But with the words he remembered Gus Wherry, as he had seen him standing in the centre of Baxter's warehouse, and it seemed to him that even his promise to the children was rendered vain and worthless.

The next day was Sunday, and immediately after dinner he walked over to Baxter's house, where he learned that Mrs. Brooke had expressed her willingness to receive him upon the following afternoon.

"We had to talk Mr. Beverly over," said Baxter, chuckling. "At first he didn't like the idea because of some notion he'd got out of his great-grandfather's head about the sacredness of the family circle. However, he's all right now, though if you take my advice, Smith, you'll play a game of dominoes with him occasionally just to keep him kind of soft. The chief thing he has against you is your preachin' in the fields, for he told me he could never bring himself to countenance religion out of doors. He seems to think that it ought to be kept shut up tight."

"Well, I'm glad he doesn't have to listen to me," responded Ordway. "By the way, you know I'm speaking in Catlett's grove of pines now. It's pleasanter away from the glare of the sun." Then as Baxter pressed him to come back to supper, he declined the oppressive hospitality and went back to Mrs. Twine's.

That afternoon at five o'clock he went out to the grove of pines on the Southern edge of the town, to find his congregation gathered ahead of him on the rude plank benches which had been placed among the trees. The sunshine fell in drops through the tent of boughs overhead, and from the southwest a pleasant breeze had sprung up, blowing the pine needles in eddies about his feet. At sight of the friendly faces gathered so closely around him, he felt his foreboding depart as if it had been blown from him by the pure breeze; and beginning his simple discourse, he found himself absorbed presently in the religious significance of his subject, which chanced to be an interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son. Not until he was midway of his last sentence did he discover that Gus Wherry was standing just beyond the little wildrose thicket on the edge of the grove.

In the instant of recognition the words upon his lips sounded strangely hollow and meaningless in his ears, and he felt again that the appearance of the man had given the lie, not only to his identity, but to his life. He knew himself at the instant to have changed from Daniel Smith to Daniel Ordway, and the name that he had worn honestly in Tappahannock showed to him suddenly as a falsehood and a cheat. Even his inward motive was contemptible in his eyes, and he felt himself dragged back in a single minute to the level upon which Wherry stood. As he appeared to Wherry, so he saw himself now by some distorted power of vision, and even his religion seemed but a convenient mask which he had picked up and used. When he went on a moment later with his closing words, he felt that the mockery of his speech must be evident to the ears of the congregation that knew and loved him.

The gathering broke up slowly, but after speaking to several men who stood near him, Ordway turned away and went out into the road which led from Tappahannock in the direction of Cedar Hill. Only after he had walked rapidly for a mile, did the sound of footsteps, following close behind him, cause him to wheel round abruptly with an impatient exclamation. As he did so, he saw that Wherry had stopped short in the road before him.

"I wanted to tell you how much obliged I am for your talk, Mr. Smith," he said, with a smile which appeared to flash at the same instant from his eyes and his teeth. "I declare you came pretty near converting me—by Jove, you did. It wouldn't be convenient to listen to you too often."

Whatever might be said of the effusive manner of his compliments, his good humour was so evident in his voice, in his laugh, and even in his conspicuously flashing teeth, that Ordway, who had been prepared for a quarrel, was rendered almost helpless by so peaceable an encounter. Turning out of the road, he stepped back among the tall weeds growing in the corner of the old "worm" fence, and rested his tightly clinched hand on the topmost rail.

"If you have anything to say to me, you will do me a favour by getting it over as soon as possible," he rejoined shortly.

Wherry had taken off his hat and the red disc of the setting sun made an appropriate frame for his handsome head, upon which his fair hair grew, Ordway noticed, in the peculiar waving circle which is found on the heads of ancient statues.

"Well, I can't say that I've anything to remark except that I congratulate you on your eloquence," he replied, with a kind of infernal amiability. "If this is your little game, you are doing it with a success which I envy from my boots up."

"Since this is your business with me, there is no need for us to discuss it further," returned Ordway, at white heat.

"Oh, but I say, don't hurry—what's the use? You're afraid I'm going to squeeze you, now, isn't that it?"

"You'll get nothing out of me if you try."

"That's as much as I want, I guess. Have I asked you for as much as a darned cent? Haven't I played the gentleman from the first minute that I spotted you?"

Ordway nodded. "Yes, I suppose you've been as fair as you knew how," he answered, "I'll do you the justice to admit that."

"Well, I tell you now," said Wherry, growing confidential as he approached, "my object isn't blackmail, it's human intercourse. I want a decent word or two, that's all, on my honour."

"But I won't talk to you. I've nothing further to say, that's to be understood."

"You're a confounded bully, that's what you are," observed Wherry, in the playful tones which he might have used to a child or an animal. "Now, I don't want a blooming cent out of you, that's flat—all I ask for is a pleasant word or two just as from man to man."

"Then why did you follow me? And what are you after in Tappahannock?"

Wherry laughed hilariously, while his remarkably fine teeth became the most prominent feature in his face.

"The reply to your question, Smith," he answered pleasantly, "is that I followed you to say that you're an all-fired, first rate sort of a preacher—there's not harm in that much, is there? If you don't want me to chaff you about it, I'll swear to be as dead serious on the subject as if it were my wife's funeral. What I want is your hand down, I say—no matter what is trumps!"

"My hand down for what?" demanded Ordway.

"Just for plain decency, nothing more, I swear. You've started on your road, and I've started on mine, and the square thing is to live and let live, that's as I see it. Leave room for honest repentance to go to work, but don't begin to pull back before it's had a chance to begin. Ain't we all prodigals, when it comes to that, and the only difference is that some of us don't get a bite at the fatted calf."

For a moment Ordway stared in silence to where the other stood with his face turned toward the red light of the sunset.

"We're all prodigals," repeated Wherry, as if impressed by the ethical problem he had uttered unawares, "you and me and the President and every man. We've all fallen from grace, ain't we?—and it's neither here nor there that you and I have got the swine husks while the President has stuffed and eaten the fatted calf."

"If you've honestly meant to begin again, I have certainly no wish to interfere," remarked Ordway, ignoring the other's excursion into the field of philosophy. As he spoke, however, it occurred to him that Wherry's reformation might have had better chance of success if it had been associated with fewer physical advantages.

"Well, I'm much obliged to you," said Wherry, "and I'll say the same by you, here's my hand on it. Rise or fall, we'll play fair."

"You haven't told me yet why you came to Tappahannock," rejoined Ordway, shortly.

"Oh, a little matter of business. Are you settled here now?"

"At the moment you can answer that question better than I."

"You mean when I come, you quit?"

Ordway nodded. "That's something like it."

"Well, I shan't drive you out if I can help it—I hate to play the sneak. The truth is if you'd only get to believe it, there's not a more peaceable fellow alive if I don't get backed up into a place where there's no way out. When it comes to that I like the clean, straight road best, and I always have. From first to last, though, it's the women that have been dead against me, and I may say that a woman—one or more of 'em—has been back of every single scrape I ever got into in my life. If I'd had ten thousand a year and a fine looking wife, I'd have been a pillar in the Church and the father of a family. My tastes all lean that way," he added sentimentally. "I've always had a weakness for babies, and I've got it to this day."

As he could think of nothing to reply to this touching confession, Ordway picked up a bit of wood from the ground, and taking out his knife, began whittling carelessly while he waited.

"I suppose you think I want to work you for that fat old codger in the warehouse," observed Wherry suddenly, passing lightly from the pathetic to the facetious point of view, "but I'll give you my word I haven't thought of it a minute."

"I'm glad you haven't," returned Ordway, quietly, "for you would be disappointed."

"You mean you wouldn't trust me?"

"I mean there's no place there. Whether I trust you or not is another question—and I don't."

"Do you think I'd turn sneak?"

"I think if you stay in Tappahannock that I'll clear out."

"Well, you're a darn disagreeable chap," said Wherry, indignantly, "particularly after all you've had to say about the prodigal. But, all the same," he added, as his natural amiability got the better of his temper, "it isn't likely that I'll pitch my tent here, so you needn't begin to pack for a day or two at least."

"Do you expect to go shortly?"

"How about to-morrow? Would that suit you?"

"Yes," said Ordway, gravely, "better than the day afterward." He threw the bit of wood away and looked steadily into the other's face. "If I can help you live honestly, I am ready to do it," he added.

"Ready? How?"

"However I can."

"Well, you can't—not now," returned Wherry, laughing, "because I've worked that little scheme already without your backing. Honesty is going to be my policy from yesterday on. Did you, by the way," he added abruptly, "ever happen to run up against Jasper Trend?"

"Jasper Trend?" exclaimed Ordway, "why, yes, he owns the cotton mills."

"He makes a handsome little pile out of 'em too, I guess?"

"I believe he does. Are you looking for a job with him?"

At this Wherry burst again into his hilarious humour. "If I am," he asked jokingly, "will you promise to stand off and not spoil the game?"

"I have nothing to do with Trend," replied Ordway, "but the day you come here is my last in Tappahannock."

"Well, I'm sorry for that," remarked Wherry, pleasantly, "for it appears to be a dull enough place even with the addition of your presence." He put on his hat and held out his hand with a friendly gesture. "Are you ready to walk back now?" he inquired.

"When I am," answered Ordway, "I shall walk back alone."

Even this rebuff Wherry accepted with his invincible good temper.

"Every man to his company, of course," he responded, "but as to my coming to Tappahannock, if it is any comfort to you to know it, you needn't begin to pack."

CHAPTER III
A Change Of Lodging

WHEN Ordway awoke the next morning, it seemed to him that Wherry had taken his place among the other nightmares, which, combined with the reflected heat from the tin roof, had rendered his sleep broken and distracted. With the sunrise his evil dreams and his recollections of Wherry had scattered together, and when, after the early closing at Baxter's warehouse, he drove out to Cedar Hill, with the leather bag containing his few possessions at his feet, he felt that there had been something morbid, almost inhuman, in the loathing aroused in him by the handsome face of his fellow prisoner. In any case, for good or for evil, he determined to banish the man utterly from his thoughts.

The vehicle in which he sat was an ancient gig driven by a decrepit Negro, and as it drew up before the steps at Cedar Hill, he was conscious almost of a sensation of shame because he had not approached the ruined mansion on foot. Then descending over the dusty wheel, he lifted out his bag, and rapped twice upon the open door with the greenish knocker which he supposed had once been shining brass. Through the hall a sleepy breeze blew from the honeysuckle arbour over the back porch, and at his right hand the swinging sword still clanked against the discoloured plaster. So quiet was the house that it seemed as if the movement of life within had been suspended, and when at last the figure of Mrs. Brooke floated down the great staircase under the pallid light from the window above, she appeared to him as the disembodied spirit of one of the historic belles who had tripped up and down in trailing brocades and satin shoes. Instead of coming toward him, she completed her ghostly impression by vanishing suddenly into the gloom beyond the staircase, and a moment afterward his knock was answered by a small, embarrassed darky in purple calico. Entering the dining-room by her invitation, he stumbled upon Beverly stretched fast asleep, and snoring slightly, upon a horsehair sofa, with the brown and white setter dozing on a mat at his feet. At the approach of footsteps, the dog, without lifting its head, began rapping the floor heavily with its tail, and aroused by the sound, Beverly opened one eye and struggled confusedly into an upright position.

"I was entirely overcome by the heat," he remarked apologetically, as he rose from the sofa and held out his hand, "but it is a pleasure to see you, Mr. Smith. I hope you did not find the sun oppressive on your drive out. Amelia, my dear," he remarked courteously, as Mrs. Brooke entered in a freshly starched print gown, "I feel a return of that strange dizziness I spoke of, so if it will not inconvenience you, may I beg for another of your refreshing lemonades?"

Mrs. Brooke, who had just completed the hasty ironing of her dress, which she had put on while it was still warm, met his request with an amiable but exhausted smile.

"Don't you think six lemonades in one day too many?" she asked anxiously, when she had shaken hands with Ordway.

"But this strange dizziness, my dear? An iced drink, I find far more effective than a bandage."

"Very well, I'll make it of course, if it gives you any relief," replied his wife, wondering if she would be able to bake the bread by the time Beverly demanded supper. "If you'll come up stairs now, Mr. Smith," she added, "Malviny will show you to the blue room."

Malviny, who proved upon further acquaintance to be the eldest great-grandchild of Aunt Mehitable, descended like a hawk upon his waiting property, while Mrs. Brooke led the procession up the staircase to an apartment upon the second floor.

The blue room, as he discovered presently, contained a few rather fine pieces of old mahogany, a grandfather's chair, with a freshly laundered chintz cover, and a rag carpet made after the "log cabin" pattern. Of the colour from which it had taken its name, there was visible only a faded sampler worked elaborately in peacock blue worsteds, by one "Margaret, aged nine." Beyond this the walls were bare of decoration, though an oblong streak upon the plaster suggested to Ordway that a family portrait had probably been removed in the hurried preparations for his arrival.

After remarking that she hoped he would "make himself quite at home," Mrs. Brooke was glancing inquiringly about the room with her large, pale, rather prominent eyes, when a flash of purple in the doorway preceded the announcement that "Marse Beverly done turn right green wid de dizziness, en wus axin' kinder faintlike fur his lemonade."

"My poor husband," explained the exhausted wife, "contracted a chronic heart trouble in the War, and he suffers so patiently that at times we are in danger of forgetting it."

Pressing her aching head, she hurried downstairs to prepare Beverly's drink, while Ordway, after closing the broken latch of the door, walked slowly up and down the large, cool, barely furnished room. After his cramped chamber at Mrs. Twine's his eyes rested with contentment upon the high white ceiling overhead, and then descended leisurely to the stately bedstead, with its old French canopy above, and to the broad, red brick hearth freshly filled with odorous boughs of cedar. The cleanly quiet of the place restored to him at once the peace which he had missed in the last few days in Tappahannock, and his nerves, which had revolted from Mrs. Twine's scolding voice and slovenly table, became composed again in the ample space of these high white walls. Even "Margaret, aged nine," delivered a soothing message to him in the faded blues of her crewel work.

When he had unpacked his bag, he drew the chintz-covered chair to the window, and leaning his elbow on the sill, looked out gratefully upon the overgrown lawn filled with sheepmint and clover. Though it was already twilight under the cedars, the lawn was still bright with sunshine, and beyond the dwindling clump of cabbage roses in the centre, he saw that the solitary cow had not yet finished her evening meal. As he watched her, his ears caught the sound of light footsteps on the porch below, and a moment afterward, he saw Emily pass from the avenue to the edge of the lawn, where she called the cow by name in a caressing voice. Lifting her head, the animal started at a slow walk through the tangled weeds, stopping from time to time to bite a particularly tempting head of purple clover. As the setting sun was in Emily's eyes, she raised her bared arm while she waited, to shield her forehead, and Ordway was struck afresh by the vigorous grace which showed itself in her slightest movement. The blue cotton dress she wore, which had shrunk from repeated washings until it had grown scant in the waist and skirt, revealed the firm rounded curve of her bosom and her slender hips. Standing there in the faint sunshine against the blue-black cedars, he felt her charm in some mysterious way to be akin to the beauty of the hour and the scene. The sight of her blue gown was associated in his mind with a peculiar freshness of feeling—an intensified enjoyment of life.

When the cow reached her side, the girl turned back toward the barnyard, and the two passed out of sight together beyond the avenue. As he followed them with his gaze, Ordway had no longer any thought of Gus Wherry, or of his possible presence in Tappahannock upon the morrow. The evil association was withdrawn now from his consciousness, and in its place he found the tranquil pleasure which he had felt while he watched the sunshine upon the sheepmint and clover—a pleasure not unlike that he had experienced when Emily's blue cotton dress was visible against the cedars. The faces of the men who had listened to him yesterday returned to his memory; and as he saw them again seated on the rude benches among the pines, his heart expanded in an emotion which was like the melting of his will into the Divine Will which contained and enveloped all.

A knock at the door startled him back to his surroundings, and when he went to answer it, he found the small frightened servant standing outside, with an old serving tray clutched desperately to her bosom. From her excited stutter he gathered that supper awaited him upon the table, and descending hastily, he found the family already assembled in the dining-room. Beverly received him graciously, Emily quietly, and the children assured him enthusiastically that they were glad he had come to stay because now they might eat ham every night. When they had been properly suppressed by Emily, her brother took up the conversation which he carried on in a polite, rambling strain that produced upon Ordway the effect of a monologue delivered in sleep.

"I hope the birds won't annoy you at daybreak, Mr. Smith," he remarked, "the ivy at your windows harbours any number of wrens and sparrows."

"Oh, I like them," replied Ordway, "I've been sleeping under a tin roof in Tappahannock which no intelligent bird or human being would approach."

"I remember," said Mr. Beverly pensively, "that there was a tin roof on the hotel at Richmond I stayed at during the War when I first met my wife. Do you recall how very unpleasant that tin roof was, Amelia? Or were you too young at the time to notice it? You couldn't have been more than fifteen, I suppose? Yes, you must have been sixteen, because I remember when I marched past the door with my regiment, I noticed you standing on the balcony, in a long white dress, and you couldn't have worn long dresses before you were sixteen."

Mrs. Brooke glanced up calmly from the coffee-pot.

"The roof was slate," she remarked with the rigid adherence to a single idea, which characterised her devoted temperament.

"Ah, to be sure, it was slate," admitted Beverly, turning his genial face upon Ordway, "and I remember now it wasn't the roof that was unpleasant, but the food—the food was very unpleasant indeed, was it not, Amelia?"

"I don't think we ever got enough of it to test its quality," replied Mrs. Brooke, "poor mama was so reduced at the end of a month that she had to take up three inches of her bodice."

"It's quite clear to me now," observed Beverly, delightedly, "it was not that the food was unpleasant, but that it was scarce—very scarce."

He had finished his supper; and when he had risen from the table with his last amiable words, he proceeded to install himself, without apparent selection, into the only comfortable chair which the room contained. Drawing out his pipe a moment afterward, he waved Ordway, with a hospitable gesture, to a stiff wooden seat, and invited him in a persuasive tone, to join him in a smoke.

"My tobacco is open to you," he observed, "but I regret to say that I am unable to offer you a cigar. Yet a cigar, I maintain, is the only form in which a gentleman should use tobacco."

Ordway took out the leather case he carried and offered it to him with a smile.

"I'm afraid they are not all that they might be," he remarked, as Beverly supplied himself with a murmured word of thanks.

Mrs. Brooke brought out her darning, and Emily, after disappearing into the pantry, sent back the small servant for the dishes. The girl did not return again before Ordway took his candle from the mantel-piece and went upstairs; and he remembered after he had reached his bedroom that she had spoken hardly two words during the entire evening. Had she any objection, he asked himself now, to his presence in the household? Was it possible, indeed, that Mrs. Brooke should have taken him in against her sister-in-law's inclination, or even without her knowledge? In the supposition there was not only embarrassment, but a sympathetic resentment; and he resolved that if such proved to be the case, he was in honour bound to return immediately to Tappahannock. Then he remembered the stifling little room under the tin roof with a feeling of thankfulness for at least this one night's escape.

Awaking at dawn he lay for a while contentedly listening to the flutter of the sparrows in the ivy, and watching the paling arch of the sky beyond the pointed tops of the cedars. A great peace seemed to encompass him at the moment, and he thought with gratitude of the quiet evening he had spent with Beverly. It was dull enough probably, when one came to think of it, yet the simple talk, the measured courtesies, returned to him now as a part of the pleasant homeliness of his surroundings. The soft starlight on the sheepmint and clover, the chirp of the small insects in the trees, the refreshing moisture which had crept toward him with the rising dew, the good-night kisses of the children, delivered under protest and beneath Mrs. Brooke's eyes—all these trivial recollections were attended in his thoughts by a train of pensive and soothing associations.

Across the hall he heard the soft opening and closing of a door, and immediately afterward the sound of rapid footsteps growing fainter as they descended the staircase. Already the room was full of a pale golden light, and as he could not sleep again because of the broken shutter to the window which gave on the lawn, he rose and dressed himself with an eagerness which recalled the early morning risings of his childhood. A little later when he went downstairs, he found that the front door was still barred, and removing the heavy iron fastenings, he descended the steps into the avenue, where the faint sunbeams had not yet penetrated the thick screen of boughs. Remembering the garden, while he stood watching the sunrise from the steps, he turned presently into the little footpath which led by the house, and pushing aside the lilacs, from which the blossoms had all dropped, he leaned on the swinging gate before the beds he had spaded on those enchanted nights. Now the rank weeds were almost strangling the plants, and it occurred to him that there was still work ready for his hand in the Brooke's garden. He was telling himself that he would begin clearing the smothered rows as soon as his morning at the warehouse was over, when the old hound ran suddenly up to him, and turning quickly he saw Emily coming from the springhouse with a print of golden butter in her hand.

"So it was you I heard stirring before sunrise!" he exclaimed impulsively, as his eyes rested on her radiant face, over which the early mist had scattered a pearly dew like the fragrant moisture upon a rose.

"Yes, it was I. At four o'clock I remembered there was no butter for breakfast, so I got up and betook myself to the churn."

"And this is the result?" he asked, glancing down at the delicious creamy mould she had just worked into shape and crowned with a printed garland of thistles. "It makes me hungry enough for my muffins upon the minute."

"You shall have them shortly," she said, smiling, "but do you prefer pop-overs or plain?"

He met the question with serious consideration.

"Well, if the choice is mine I think I'll have pop-overs," he replied.

Before his unbroken gravity her quick humour rippled forth.

"Then I must run to Aunt Mehitable," she responded merrily, "for I suspect that she has already made them plain."

With a laughing nod she turned from him, and following the little path entered the house under the honeysuckle arbour on the back porch.

CHAPTER IV
Shows That A Laugh Does Not Heal A Heartache

WHEN Emily entered the dining-room, she found that Beverly had departed from his usual custom sufficiently to appear in time for breakfast.

"I hardly got a wink of sleep last night, my dear," he remarked, "and I think it was due entirely to the heavy supper you insisted upon giving us."

"But, Beverly, we must have hot things now," said Emily, as she arranged the crocheted centrepiece upon the table. "Mr. Smith is our boarder, you know, not our guest."

"The fact that he is a boarder," commented Beverly, with dignity, "entirely relieves me of any feeling of responsibility upon his account. If he were an invited guest in the house, I should feel as you do that hot suppers are a necessity, but when a man pays for the meals he eats, we are no longer under an obligation to consider his preferences."

"His presence in the household is a great trial to us all," observed his wife, whose attitude of general acceptance was modified by the fact that she accepted everything for the worst. Her sense of tragic values had been long since obliterated by a gray wash of melancholy that covered all.

"Well, I don't see that he is very zealous about interfering with us," remarked Emily, almost indignantly, "he doesn't appear to be of a particularly sociable disposition."

"Yes, I agree with you that he is unusually depressing," rejoined Mrs. Brooke. "It's a pity, perhaps, that we couldn't have secured a blond person—they are said to be of a more sanguine temperament, and I remember that the blond boarder at Miss Jennie Colton's, when I called there once, was exceedingly lively and entertaining. But it's too late, of course, to give advice now; I can only hope and pray that his morals, at least, are above reproach."

As the entire arrangement with Baxter had been made by Mrs. Brooke herself upon the day that Wilson, the grocer, had sent in his bill for the fifth time, Emily felt that an impatient rejoinder tripped lightly upon her tongue; but restraining her words with an effort, she observed cheerfully an instant later that she hoped Mr. Smith would cause no inconvenience to the family.

"Well, he seems to be a respectable enough person," admitted Beverly, in his gracious manner, "but, of course, if he were to become offensively presuming it would be a very simple matter to drop him a hint."

"It reminds me of a case I read of in the newspaper a few weeks ago," said Mrs. Brooke, "where a family in Roanoke took a stranger to board with them and shortly afterward were all poisoned by a powder in the soup. No, they weren't all poisoned," she corrected herself thoughtfully, "for I am positive now that the boarder was the only one who died. It was the cook who put the poison into the soup and the boarder who ate all of it. I remember the Coroner remarked at the inquest that he had saved the lives of the entire family."

"All the same I hope Mr. Smith won't eat all the soup," observed Emily.

"It terrifies me at times," murmured Amelia, "to think of the awful power that we place so carelessly in the hands of cooks."

"In that case, my dear, it might be quite a safeguard always to have a boarder at the table," suggested Beverly, with his undaunted optimism.

"But surely, Amelia," laughed Emily, "you can't suppose that after she has lived in the family for seventy years, Aunt Mehitable would yield at last to a passing temptation to destroy us?"

"I imagine the poor boarder suspected nothing while he ate his soup," returned Mrs. Brooke. "No, I repeat that in cases like that no one is safe, and the only sensible attitude is to be prepared for anything."

"Well, if I'm to be poisoned, I think I'd prefer to take it without preparation," rejoined Emily. "There is Mr. Smith now in the hall, so we may as well send Malviny to bring in breakfast."

When Ordway entered an instant later with his hearty greeting, even Mrs. Brooke unbent a trifle from her rigid melancholy and joined affably in the conversation. By a curious emotional paradox she was able to enjoy him only as an affliction; and his presence in the house had served as an excuse for a continuous parade of martyrdom. From the hour of his arrival, she had been perfectly convinced not only that he interfered with her customary peace of mind, but that he prevented her as surely from receiving her supply of hot water upon rising and her ordinary amount of food at dinner.

But as the days went by he fell so easily into his place in the family circle that they forgot at last to remark either his presence or his personal peculiarities. After dinner he would play his game of dominoes with Beverly in the breezy hall, until the sunlight began to slant across the cedars, when he would go out into the garden and weed the overgrown rows. Emily had seen him but seldom alone during the first few weeks of his stay, though she had found a peculiar pleasure in rendering him the small domestic services of which he was quite unconscious. How should he imagine that it was her hand that arranged the flowers upon his bureau, that placed his favourite chair near the window, and that smoothed the old-fashioned dimity coverlet upon his bed. Still less would he have suspected that the elaborate rag carpet upon his floor was one which she had contributed to his comfort from her own room. Had he known these things he would probably have been melancholy enough to have proved congenial company even to Mrs. Brooke, though, in reality, there was, perhaps, nothing he could have offered Emily which would have exceeded the pleasure she now found in these simple services. Ignorant as she was in all worldly matters, in grasping this essential truth, she had stumbled unawares upon the pure philosophy of love—whose satisfaction lies, after all, not in possession, but in surrender.

She was still absorbed in the wonder of this discovery, when going out into the garden one afternoon to gather tomatoes for a salad, she found him working among the tall, green corn at the end of the long walk. As he turned toward her in the late sunshine, which slanted across the waving yellow tassels, she noticed that there was the same eager, youthful look in his face that she had seen on the night when she had come down to find him spading by the moonbeams.

In response to her smile he came out from among the corn, and went with her down the narrow space which separated two overgrown hills of tomato plants. He wore no coat and his striped cotton shirt was open at the throat and wrists.

"It's delicious in the corn now," he said; "I can almost fancy that I hear the light rustle along the leaves."

"You love the country so much that you ought to have been a farmer," she returned, "then you might have raised tobacco."

"That reminds me that I worked yesterday in your brother's crop—but it's too sticky for me. I like the garden better."

"Then you ought to have a garden of your own. Is all your chopping and your digging merely for the promotion of the general good?"

"Isn't it better so?" he asked, smiling, "particularly when I share in the results as I shall in this case? Who knows but that I shall eat this wonderful tomato to-night at supper?"

She took it from his hand and placed it on the lettuce leaves in the bottom of the basket upon her arm.

"You make a careful choice, I see," she observed, "it is a particularly fine one."

"I suppose your philosophy would insist that after plucking it I should demand the eating of it also?"

"I don't know about my philosophy—I haven't any—but my common sense would."

"I'm not sure," he returned half seriously, "that I have much opinion of common sense."

"But you would have," she commented gravely, "if you had happened to be born with Beverly for a brother. I used to think that all men were alike," she added, "but you don't remind me of Beverly in the very least."

As she spoke she turned her face slightly toward him, and still leaning over the luxuriant tomato row, looked up at him joyously with her sparkling eyes. Her breath came quickly and he saw her bosom rise and fall under the scant bodice of her blue cotton gown. Almost unconsciously he had drifted into an association with her which constituted for him the principal charm of his summer at Cedar Hill.

"On the other hand I've discovered many points of resemblance," he retorted in his whimsical tone.

"Well, you're both easy to live in the house with, I admit that."

"And we're both perfectly amiable as long as everybody agrees with us and nobody crosses us," he added.

"I shouldn't like to cross you," she said, laughing, "but then why should I? Isn't it very pleasant as it is now?"

"Yes, it is very pleasant as it is now," he repeated slowly.

Turning away from her he stood looking in silence over the tall corn to the amber light that fell beyond the clear outline of a distant hill. The association was, as she had just said, very pleasant in his thoughts, and the temptation he felt now was to drift on with the summer, leaving events to shape themselves as they would in the future. What harm, he demanded, could come of any relation so healthful, so simple as this?

"I used to make dolls of ears of corn when I was little," said Emily, laughing; "they were the only ones I had except those Beverly carved for me out of hickory nuts. The one with yellow tassels I named Princess Goldylocks until she began to turn brown and then I called her Princess Fadeaway."

At her voice, which sounded as girlish in his imagination as the voice of Alice when he had last heard it, he started and looked quickly back from the sunset into her face.

"Has it ever occurred to you," he asked, "how little—how very little you know of me? By you I mean all of you, especially your brother and Mrs. Brooke."

Her glowing face questioned him for a moment.

"But what is knowledge," she demanded, "if it isn't just feeling, after all?"

"I wonder why under heaven you took me in?" he went on, leaving her words unanswered.

Had Mrs. Brooke stood in Emily's place, she would probably have replied quite effectively, "because the grocer's bill had come for the fifth time"; but the girl had learned to wear her sincerity in a less conspicuous fashion, so she responded to his question merely by a polite evasion.

"We have certainly had no cause to regret it," was what she said.

"What I wanted to say to you in the beginning and couldn't, was just this," he resumed, choosing his words with a deliberation which sounded strained and unnatural, "I suppose it can't make any difference to you—it doesn't really concern you, of course—that's what I felt—but," he hesitated an instant and then went on more rapidly, "my daughter's birthday is to-day. She is fifteen years old and it is seven years since I saw her."

"Seven years?" repeated Emily, as she bent over and carefully selected a ripe tomato.

"Doubtless I shouldn't know her if I were to pass her in the street," he pursued, after a minute. "But it's worse than that and it's harder—for it's as many years since I saw my wife."

She had not lifted her head from the basket, and he felt suddenly that her stillness was not the stillness of flesh, but of marble.

"Perhaps I ought to have told you all this before," he went on again, "perhaps it wasn't fair to let you take me in in ignorance of this and of much else?"

Raising her head, she stood looking into his face with her kind, brown eyes.

"But how could these things possibly affect us?" she asked, smiling slightly.

"No," he replied slowly, "they didn't affect you, of course—they don't now. It made no difference to any of you, I thought. How could it make any?"

"No, it makes no difference to any of us," she repeated quietly.

"Then, perhaps, I've been wrong in telling you this to-day?"

She shook her head. "Not in telling me, but," she drew a long breath, "it might be as well not to speak of it to Beverly or Amelia—at least for a while."

"You mean they would regret their kindness?"

"It would make them uncomfortable—they are very old-fashioned in their views. I don't know just how to put it, but it seems to them—oh, a terrible thing for a husband and wife to live apart."

"Well, I shan't speak of it, of course—but would it not be better for me to return immediately to Tappahannock?"

For an instant she hesitated. "It would be very dreadful at Mrs. Twine's."

"I know it," he answered, "but I'm ready to go back, this minute if you should prefer it."

"But I shouldn't," she rejoined in her energetic manner. "Why should I, indeed? It is much wiser for you to stay here until the end of the summer."

When she had finished he looked at her a moment without replying. The light had grown very faint and through the thin mist that floated up from the fields her features appeared drawn and pallid.

"What I can't make you understand is that even though it is all my fault—every bit my fault from the beginning—yet I have never really wanted to do evil in my heart. Though I've done wrong, I've always wanted to do right."

If she heard his words they made little impression upon her, for going out into the walk, she started, without speaking, in the direction of the house. Then, when she had moved a few steps from him, she stopped and looked back as if she had forgotten something that had been in her thoughts.

"I meant to tell you that I hope—I pray it will come right again," she said.

"I thank you," he answered, and drew back into the corn so that she might go on alone.

A moment later as Emily walked rapidly down the garden path, it seemed to her that the distance between the gate and the house covered an immeasurable space. Her one hope was that she might go to her room for at least the single hour before supper, and that there, behind a locked door with her head buried in the pillows, she might shed the hot tears which she felt pressing against her eyelids.

Entering the hall, she had started swiftly up the staircase, with the basket of tomatoes still on her arm, when Mrs. Brooke intercepted her by descending like a phantom from the darkened bend.

"O Emily, I've been looking for you for twenty minutes," she cried in despairing tones. "The biscuits refused to rise and Aunt Mehitable is in a temper. Will you run straight out to the kitchen and beat up a few quick muffins for supper."

Drawing back into the corner of the staircase, Emily glanced down upon the tomatoes lying in the bottom of the basket; then without raising her eyes she spoke in a voice which might have uttered appropriately a lament upon the universal tragedy of her sex.

"I suppose I may as well make them plain?" she said.

CHAPTER V
Treats Of A Great Passion In A Simple Soul

FOR several weeks in August Ordway did not go into Tappahannock, and during his vacation from the warehouse he made himself useful in a number of small ways upon the farm. The lawn was trimmed, the broken fences mended, the garden kept clear of wiregrass, and even Mrs. Brooke's "rockery" of portulaca, with which she had decorated a mouldering stump, received a sufficient share of his attention to cause the withered plants to grow green again and blossom in profusion. When the long, hot days had drawn to a close, he would go out with a watering-pot and sprinkle the beds of petunias and geraniums which Emily had planted in the bare spots beside the steps.

"The truth is I was made for this sort of thing, you know," he remarked to her one day. "If it went on forever I should never get bored or tired."

Something candid and boyish in his tone caused her to look up at him quickly with a wondering glance. Since the confession of his marriage her manner to him had changed but little, yet she was aware, with a strange irritation against herself, that she never heard his voice or met his eyes without remembering instantly that he had a wife whom he had not seen for seven years. The mystery of the estrangement was as great to her as it had ever been, for since that afternoon in the garden he had not referred again to the subject; and judging the marriage relation by the social code of Beverly and Amelia, she had surmised that some tremendous tragedy had been the prelude to a separation of so many years. As he lifted the watering-pot he had turned a little away from her, and while her eyes rested upon his thick dark hair, powdered heavily with gray above the temples, and upon the strong, sunburnt features of his profile, she asked herself in perplexity where that other woman was and if it were possible that she had forsaken him? "I wonder what she is like and if she is pretty or plain?" she thought. "I almost hope she isn't pretty, and yet it's horrid of me and I wonder why I hope so? What can it matter since he hasn't seen her for seven years, and if he ever sees her again, she will probably be no longer young. I suppose he isn't young, and yet I've never thought so before and somehow it doesn't seem to matter. No, I'm sure his wife is beautiful," she reflected a moment later, as a punishment for her uncharitable beginning, "and she has fair hair, I hope, and a lovely white skin and hands that are always soft and delicate. Yes, that is how it is and I am very glad," she concluded resolutely. And it seemed to her that she could see distinctly this woman whom she had imagined and brought to life.

"I can't help believing that you would tire of it in time," she said presently aloud.

"Do you tire of it?" he asked in a softened voice, turning his gaze upon her.

"I?" she laughed, with a bitterness he had never heard in her tone before, "oh, yes, but I suppose that doesn't count in the long run. Did there ever live a woman who hasn't felt at times like railing against the milk pans and denying the eternal necessity of ham and eggs?"

Though she spoke quite seriously the simplicity of her generalisation brought a humorous light to his eyes; and in his imagination he saw Lydia standing upon the white bearskin rug against the oval mirror and the gold-topped bottles upon her dressing-table.

"Well, if I'd made as shining a success at my job as you have at yours, I think I'd be content," was all he said.

She laughed merrily, and he saw that the natural sweetness of her temper was proof against idle imaginings or vain desires.

"You think then that it is better to do a small thing well than a big thing badly?" she inquired.

"But it isn't a small thing," he protested, "it's a great big thing—it's the very biggest thing of all."

A provoking smile quivered on her lips, and he saw the dimple come and go in her cheek.

"I am glad at least that you like my ham and eggs," she retorted mockingly.

"I do," he answered gravely, "I like your ham and eggs, but I admire your courage, also."

She shook her head. "It's the cheapest of the virtues."

"Not your kind, my dear child—it's the rarest and the costliest of achievements."

"Oh, I don't know how serious you are," she answered lightly, "but it's a little like putting a man on a desert island and saying, 'make your bed or lie on the rocks.' He's pretty apt to make his bed, isn't he?"

"Not in the least. He usually puts up a flag of distress and then sits down in the sand and looks out for a ship."

Her voice lost its merriment. "When my ship shows on the horizon, it will be time enough to hoist my flag."

A reply was on his lips, but before he could utter it, she had turned away and was moving rapidly across the lawn to the house.

The next morning Ordway went into Tappahannock, not so much on account of the little business he found awaiting him at the warehouse, as urged by the necessity of supplying Beverly with cigars. To furnish Beverly three times a day with the kind of cigar he considered it "worth while for a gentleman to smoke"—even though his choice fell, in Ordway's opinion, upon a quite inferior brand—had become in the end a courtesy too extravagant for him to contemplate with serenity. Yet he knew that almost in spite of himself this tribute to Beverly was now an established fact, and that as long as he remained at Cedar Hill he would continue to supply with eagerness the smoke which Beverly would accept with affability.

The town was dull enough at mid August, he remembered from the blighting experience of last summer; and now, after a fierce drought which had swept the country, he saw the big, fan-shaped leaves on Mrs. Twine's evening glory hanging like dusty rags along the tin roof of the porch. Banks was away, Baxter was away, and the only acquaintance he greeted was Bill Twine, sitting half drunk, in his shirt sleeves and collarless, on the front steps. There was positive relief when, at the end of an hour, he retraced his steps, with Beverly's cigars under his right arm.

After this the summer declined slowly into autumn, and Ordway began to count the long golden afternoons as they dropped one by one into his memory of Cedar Hill. An appeal to Mrs. Brooke, whom he had quite won over by his attentions to Beverly and the children, delayed his moving back into Tappahannock until the beginning of November, and he told himself with satisfaction that it would be possible to awake on frosty October mornings and look out upon the red and gold of the landscape.

Late in September Banks returned from his vacation, and during his first visit to Cedar Hill, he showed himself painfully nervous and ill at ease. But coming out for a walk with Ordway one afternoon, he suggested at the end of their first mile that they should sit down and have a smoke beneath a young cherry tree upon the roadside. As he lit his pipe he held the match in his hand until it burned his fingers; then throwing it into the grass, he turned upon his companion as eloquently despairing a look as it is in the power of a set of naturally cheerful features to assume.

"Smith," he asked in a hollow voice, "do you suppose it's really any worse to die by your own hand than by disease?"

"By Jove!" exclaimed Ordway, and the moment afterward, "Come, now, out with it, Banks. How has she been behaving this time?"

Banks lowered his voice, while he glanced suspiciously up at the branches of the cherry tree beneath which they sat.

"She hates the sight of me," he answered, with a groan.

"Nonsense," rejoined Ordway, cheerfully. "Love has before now worn the mask of scorn."

"But it hasn't worn the mask of boredom," retorted the despairing Banks.

For a minute his answer appeared final even to Ordway, who stared blankly over the ripened cornfield across the road, without, for the life of him, being able to frame a single encouraging sentence in reply.

"If it's the last word I speak," pursued Banks, biting desperately at the stem of his pipe, "she cannot abide the sight of me."

"But how does she show it?" demanded Ordway, relieved that he was not expected to combat the former irrefutable statement.

"She tried to keep me away from the springs where she went, and when I would follow her, whether or no, she hardly opened her mouth to me for the first two days. Then if I asked her to go to walk she would say it was too hot for walking, and if I asked her to drive she'd answer that she didn't drive with men. As if she and I hadn't been together in a dog-cart over every road within twenty miles of Tappahannock!"

"But perhaps the custom of the place was different?"

"No, sir, it was not custom that kept her," replied Banks, in a bitterness that scorned deception, "for she went with others. It was the same thing about dancing, too, for if I asked her to dance, she would always declare that she didn't have the strength to use her fan, and the minute after I went away, I'd see her floating round the ball-room in somebody else's arms. Once I did get her to start, but she left off after the first round, because, she said, we could not keep in step. And yet I'd kept in step with her ever since we went on roller skates together."

He broke off for an instant, knocked the cold ashes out of his pipe, and plucking a long blade of grass, began chewing it nervously as he talked.

"And yet if you could only have seen her when she came down to the ball-room in her white organdie and blue ribbons," he exclaimed presently, in an agony of recollection.

"Well, I'm rather glad on the whole that I didn't," rejoined Ordway.

"You'd have fallen in love with her if you had—you couldn't have helped it."

"Then, thank heaven, I escaped the test. It's a pretty enough pickle as it is now."

"I could have stood it all," said Banks, "if it hadn't been for the other man. She might have pulled every single strand of my hair out if she'd wanted to, and I'd have grit my teeth and pretended that I liked it. I didn't care how badly she treated me. What hurt me was how well she treated the other man."

"Did she meet him for the first time last summer?" asked Ordway.

"Oh no, she's known him ever since she went North in the spring—but it's worse now than it's ever been and, upon my word, she doesn't seem to have eyes or ears for anybody else."

"So you're positive she means to marry him?"

"She swears she doesn't—that it's only fun, you know. But in my heart I believe it is as good as settled between them."

"Well, if she's made up her mind to it, I don't, for the life of me, see how you're going to stop her," returned Ordway, smiling.

"But a year ago she'd made up her mind to marry me," groaned Banks.

"If she's as variable as that, my dear boy, perhaps the wind will blow her heart back to you again."

"I don't believe she's got one," rejoined Banks, with the merciless dissection of the pure passion; "I sometimes think that she hasn't any more heart than—than—I don't know what."

"In that case I'd drag myself together and let her alone. I'd go back to my work and resolve never to give her another thought."

"Then," replied Banks, "you might have all the good sense that there is in the business, but you wouldn't be in love. Now I love her for what she is, and I don't want her changed even if it would make her kinder. When she used to be sweet I thought sweetness the most fascinating thing on earth, and now that she bangs me, I've come to think that banging is."

"I begin to understand," remarked Ordway, laughing, "why you are not what might be called a successful lover."

"It isn't because I don't know the way," returned Banks gloomily, "it's because I can't practice it even after I've planned it out. Don't I lie awake at night making up all sorts of speeches I'm going to say to her in the morning? Oh, I can be indifferent enough when I'm dressing before the mirror—I've even put on a purple cravat because she hated it, but I've always taken it off again before I went downstairs to breakfast. Then as soon as I lay my eyes upon her, I feel my heart begin to swell as if it would burst out of my waistcoat, and instead of the flippant speeches I've planned, I crawl and whimper just as I did the day before."

They were seated under a cherry tree by the side of the road which led to Tappahannock, and as Banks finished his confessions, a large, dust covered buggy was seen approaching them from the direction of the town. As Ordway recognised Baxter through the cloud of dust raised by the wheels, he waved his hat with a shout of welcome, and a minute later the buggy reached them and drew up in the patch of briars upon the roadside.

"I was just on my way to see you, Smith," said Baxter, as he let fall the reins and held out his great dirty hand, "but I'm too heavy to get out, and if I once sat down on the ground, I reckon it would take more than the whole of Tappahannock to pull me up again."

"Well, go ahead to Cedar Hill," suggested Ordway, "and we'll follow you at a brisk walk."

"No, I won't do that. I can say what I have got to say right here over the wheel, if you'll stand awhile in the dust. Major Leary was in to see me again this morning, and the notion he's got in his head now is that you're the man to run for Mayor of Tappahannock."

"I!" exclaimed Ordway, drawing back slightly as he spoke. "He forgets that I'm out of the question. I refuse, of course."

"Well, you see, he says you're the only man we've got strong enough to defeat Jasper Trend—and he's as sure as shot that you'd have something like a clean walk-over. He's already drawn up a big red flag with 'The People's Candidate: Ten Commandment Smith,' upon it. I asked him why he wouldn't put just plain 'Daniel,' but he said that little Biblical smack alone was worth as much as a bushel of votes to you. If you drew the line at 'Ten Commandment' he's going to substitute 'Daniel-in-the-Lions'-Den Smith' or something of that kind."

"Tell him to stop it," broke in Ordway, with a smothered anger in his usually quiet voice, "he's said nothing to me about it, and I decline it absolutely and without consideration!"

"You mean you won't run?" inquired Baxter, in astonishment.

"I mean I won't run—I can't run—put it any way you please."

"I thought you'd put your whole heart and soul into defeating Trend."

"I have, but not that way—where's Trenton whom we've been talking of all summer?"

"He's out of it—consumption, the doctor says—anyway he's going South."

"Then there's but one other man," said Ordway, decisively, "and that's Baxter."

"Me?" said Baxter softly, "you mean me, do you say?" His chuckle shook the buggy until it creaked upon its rusty wheels. "I can't," he added, with a burst of humour, "to tell the truth, I'm afraid."

"Afraid?" repeated Ordway, "you're afraid of Jasper Trend?"

"No," said Baxter, "it ain't Jasper—it's my wife."

He winked slowly as he caught Ordway's eyes, and then picking up the reins, made a movement as if to turn back to Tappahannock. "So you're dead sure then that you can't be talked over?" he asked.

"As sure as you are," returned Ordway promptly; then as the buggy started back in the direction from which it had come, he went over to Banks, who had risen to his feet and was leaning heavily against the cherry tree, with the long blade of grass still between his teeth.

"What do you think of their wanting to make me Mayor, Banks?" he inquired, with a laugh.

Banks started from his gloomy reverie. "Mayor!" he exclaimed almost with animation. "Why, they've shown jolly good sense, that's what I think!"

"Well, you needn't begin to get excited," responded Ordway, "for I didn't accept, and you won't have to quarrel either with me or with Jasper Trend."

"There's one thing you may be sure of," said Banks with energy, "and that is that I'd quarrel with Jasper every time."

"In spite of Milly?" laughed Ordway.

"In spite of Milly," repeated Banks in an awed but determined voice; "she may manage my hair and my cravats and my life to come, but I'll be darned if she's going to manage my vote!"

"All the same I'm glad you can honestly stick to Jasper," said Ordway, "he counts on you now, doesn't he?"

"Oh, I suppose so," returned Banks, without enthusiasm; "at any rate, I think he'd rather she'd marry me than Brown."

There was a moment's silence in which the name brought no association into Ordway's consciousness. Then in a single flashing instant the truth leaped upon him, and the cornfields across the road surged up to meet his eyes like the waves of a high sea.

"Than whom?" he demanded in so loud a tone that Banks fell back a step and looked at him with blinking eyelids.

"Than marry whom?" asked Ordway for the second time, dropping his voice almost to a whisper before the blank surprise in the other's face.

"Oh, his name's Brown—Horatio Brown—I thought I'd told you," answered Banks, and he added a moment later, "you've met him, I believe."

"Yes," said Ordway, with an effort, "he's the handsome chap who came here last June, isn't he?"

"Oh, he's handsome enough," admitted Banks, and he groaned out presently. "You liked him, didn't you?"

Ordway smiled slightly as he met the desperation in the other's look.

"I like him," he answered quietly, "as much as I like a toad."

CHAPTER VI
In Which Baxter Plots

WHEN Baxter reached the warehouse the following morning, he found Major Leary pacing restlessly back and forth under the brick archway, with the regular military step at which, during the four years' war, he had marched into battle.

"Come in, sir, come in and sit down," said Baxter, leading the way into his office, and sweeping a pile of newspapers from an armchair with a hospitable gesture.

"Have you seen Smith? and is he all right?" were the Major's first words, as he placed his hat upon the table and took a quick, impatient turn about the room before throwing himself into the chair which the other had emptied. He was a short, erect, nervous man, with a fiery face, a pair of small gray eyes, like steel points, and a long white moustache, discoloured where it overhung his mouth by the faint yellow stain of tobacco.

"Oh, I've see him," answered Baxter in a soothing voice, "but he won't run—there's no use talking. He's dead set against it."

"Won't run?" cried the Major, furiously. "Nonsense, sir, he must run. There's no help for it. Did you tell him that we'd decided that he should run?"

"I told him," returned Baxter, "but, somehow, it didn't look as if he were impressed. He was so positive that he would not even let me put in a word more on the subject. 'Are you dead sure, Smith?' I said, and he answered, 'I'm as dead sure as you are yourself, Baxter.'"

The Major crossed his knees angrily, stretched himself back in his chair, and began pulling nervously at the ends of his moustache.

"Well, I'll have to see him myself," he said authoritatively.

"You may see him as much as you please," replied Baxter, with a soft, offended dignity, "but I'll be mightily surprised, sir, if you get him to change his mind."

"Well, I reckon you're right, Bob," admitted the other, after a moment's reflection, "what he won't do for you, it isn't likely that he'll do for the rest of Tappahannock—but the fact remains that somebody has got to step up and defeat Jasper Trend. Now I ask you pointblank—where'll you get your man?"

"The Lord knows!" sighed Baxter, and he sucked hard at the stem of his pipe.

"Then I tell you if you can't make Smith come out, it's your duty as an honest citizen to run yourself."

Baxter relapsed into a depressed silence, in the midst of which his thoughts were invaded not so much by the political necessity of the occasion as by the small, but dominant figure of his wife. The big man, who had feared neither shot nor bayonet, trembled in spirit as he imagined the outraged authority that could express itself in a person that measured hardly a fraction more than five feet from her shoes to the curling gray fringe above her forehead. He remembered that once in the early days of his marriage, he had allowed himself to be seduced by the promise of political honours, and that for a whole miserable month he had gone without griddle cakes and syrup for his breakfast. "No—no, I could never tell Marthy," he thought, desperately, still seeing in imagination the pretty, indignant face of Mrs. Baxter.

"It's your duty as an honest citizen to run yourself," repeated the Major, rapping the arm of his chair to enforce his words.

"I can't," rejoined Baxter, hopelessly, "I can't sir," and he added an instant afterward, "you see women have got the idea somehow, that politics ain't exactly moral."

"Women!" said the Major, in the dry, contemptuous tone in which he might have uttered the word, "Pshaw!"

"I don't mean just 'women,'" replied Baxter, "I mean my wife."

"Oh!" said the Major, "you mean your wife would be opposed to the whole thing?"

"She wouldn't hear of it, sir, she simply wouldn't hear a word of it."

For a long pause the Major made no answer; then rising from his chair he began pacing with his military stride up and down the floor of the little room. At the end of five minutes he turned upon Baxter with an exclamation of triumph, and threw himself again into the armchair beside the desk.

"I have it, Bob!" he said, slapping his knee until the dust flew out of his striped trousers, "I knew I'd get it in the end and here it is. The very thing, on my word, sir, I've discovered the very thing."

"Then I'm out of it," said Baxter, "an' I'm mighty glad of that."

"Oh, no, you aren't out of it—not just yet," said the Major, "we're to start you in, Bob, you're to start in as a candidate; and then a week before the nomination, something will crop up to make you fall out of the race, and you'll turn over all your votes to Smith. It would be too late, then, for him to back out—he'd simply have to keep in to save the day."

In spite of the roar of delight with which the Major ended his speech, Baxter sat unconvinced and unmoved, shaking his great head in a voiceless protest against the plot.

"It's the only way, I tell you," urged the Major, half pleased, half angry. "After Smith you're by long odds the most popular man in Tappahannock, and if it isn't one of you, it's Jasper Trend and his everlasting barrooms."

"But suppose Smith still declines," said Baxter remembering his wife.

"Oh, he won't—he isn't a blamed fool," returned the Major, "and if he does," he added impressively, "if he does I swear to you I'll go into the race myself."

He held out his hand and Baxter grasped it in token of good faith.

"Then I'll do it," said the big man, "provided—" he hesitated, cleared his throat, and went on bravely, "provided there's no objection to my telling my wife the scheme"—bending his ear an instant, he drew back with an embarrassed and guilty face, "that's Smith's step in the warehouse. He'll be in here in less than two minutes."

The Major took up his hat, and flung back the door with a hurried movement.

"Well, good-bye, I'll see Smith later about the plans," he returned, "and meanwhile, we'll go hard to work to whip our friend Jasper."

Meeting Ordway an instant later upon the threshold, he passed him with a flourish of his hat, and marched rapidly under the brick archway out into the street.

As his bookkeeper entered Baxter appeared to be absorbed in a newspaper which he had picked up hastily from the pile upon the floor.

"Good-morning," said Ordway, a little surprised; "it looks as if I'd put the fiery Major to flight."

"Smith," said Baxter, dropping his paper, and lifting his big, simple face to the younger man, "Smith, you've got me into a hole, and I want you to pull me out again."

"A hole?" repeated Ordway; then as light broke on him, he laughed aloud and held out his hand. "Oh, I see, he's going to make you Mayor of Tappahannock!"

With a groan Baxter prodded fresh tobacco into his pipe, and applying a match, sat for several minutes brooding in silence amid the cloud of smoke.

"He says it's got to be either you or me," he pursued presently, without noticing Ordway's ejaculation, "and on my word, Smith, seeing I've got a wife who's all against it, I think it would be but fair to me to let me off. You're my friend now, ain't you? Well, I'm asking you, Smith, as friend to friend."

A flush passed slowly over Ordway's face, and the unusual colour lent a peculiar animation to his glance. As Baxter met his eyes, he was conscious that they pierced through him, bright blue, sparkling, as incisive as a blade.

"To tell the truth, the thing is all but impossible," said Ordway, after a long pause. "You don't know, I suppose, that I've never even touched politics in Tappahannock."

"That ain't the point, Smith—it's going on three years since you came here—am I right?"

"Yes—three years next March, and it seems a century."

"Well, anyway, you've as good a right as I to be Mayor, and a long sight better one than Jasper Trend has. Come, now, Smith, if you don't get me out of this hole I'm in, heaven knows how I 'm going to face the Major."

"Give me time," said Ordway, quickly, "give me time—a week from to-morrow I am to make my first speech in the town hall. May I have till then?"

"Till Thursday week? Oh, I say, Smith, you've got to give in in the end—and a week sooner or later, what's the difference?"

Without replying, Ordway walked slowly to the window and stood looking out upon the steep street that crawled up from the railroad track, where an engine whistled. He had held out till now, but with Baxter's last words he had heard in his thoughts a question larger and older than any of which his employer had dreamed. "Why not?" he asked himself again as he looked out upon the sunshine. "Why should not Daniel Smith, for a good purpose, resume the rights which Daniel Ordway has forfeited?" And it appeared to him while he stood there that his decision involved not himself alone, and that the outcome had ceased to be merely an election to the highest office in Tappahannock. Infinitely deep and wide, the problem belonged not only to his individual life, but to the lives of all those who had sinned and paid the penalty of sin and asked of humanity the right and the freedom to begin anew. The impulsive daring which he had almost lived down stirred for an instant in his pulses, and turning quickly he looked at Baxter with a boyish laugh.

"If I go in, Baxter, I go in to win!" he cried.

At the moment it had seemed to him that he was obliging rather than ambitious in the choice that he had made; but several days later, when he came out of the warehouse to find the Major's red flag flying in the street, he felt the thrill of his youthful enthusiasm quicken in his blood. There was a strangely martial air about the red flag in the sunshine, and the response in his pulses was not unlike the ardour of battle.

"After all the world is no smaller here than it is in New York," he thought, "only the littleness of the one is different from the littleness of the other. In either place success would have meant nothing in itself, but in Tappahannock I can be more than successful, I can be useful." With the words it seemed to him that his heart dissolved in happiness, and as he looked now on the people who passed him in the street—on the old Negro midwife waddling down the board walk; on the Italian who kept a fruit stand at the corner; on the pretty girl flirting in the door of the harness shop; and on the rough-coated, soft-eyed country horses—he felt that one and all of these must recognise and respond to the goodwill that had overflowed his thoughts. So detached from personal bitterness, indeed, was even his fight against Jasper Trend that he went out of his way at the top of the hill to pick up a small whip which the Mayor had dropped from horseback as he rode by. The scowling thanks with which Jasper received the courtesy puzzled him for a moment until he remembered that by the man in the harness shop they were regarded probably as enemies. At the recollection he stopped short in his walk and laughed aloud—no, he was not interested in fighting anything so small, so insignificant as Jasper Trend. It was the injustice, the social disease he combated and not the man. "I wonder if he really hates me?" he thought, for it seemed to him absurd and meaningless that one man should waste his strength in hating another. "If he'd been five years in prison he would have learned how foolish it all is," he added; and an instant afterward he asked himself almost with terror if his punishment had been, in reality, the greatest good that had come to him in life? Without that terrible atonement would he have gone on like Jasper Trend from fraud to fraud, from selfishness to damnation?

Looking round him in the perfect October weather, he felt that the emotion in his heart swelled suddenly to rapture. Straight ahead the sunshine sifted in drops through the red and yellow trees that bordered the roadside, while in the field on his right the brown cornricks crowded in even rows to where the arch of the hill was outlined against the deep blue sky. Here was not only peace, but happiness, and his old life, as he glanced back upon it, appeared hollow, futile, a corpse without breath or animation. That was the mere outward form and body of existence; but standing here in the deserted road, with his eyes on the brilliant October fields, he could tell himself that he had come at last into the ways and the understanding of faith. As he had once walked by sight alone and stumbled, so he moved now blindly like a child that is led step by step through the dark.

From the road behind him a happy laugh struck on his ears, and turning quickly he saw that a dog-cart was rolling rapidly from Tappahannock. As he stepped back upon the roadside to avoid the dust raised by the wheels, he lifted his eyes to the face of Milly Trend, who sat, flushed and smiling, under a pink sunshade. She bowed joyfully; and it was not until a moment afterward, when the cart had gone by, that Ordway realised, almost with the force of a blow struck unawares, that he had acknowledged the obsequious greeting of Gus Wherry.

After the pink sunshade had vanished, Milly's laugh was still blown back to him on the rising wind. With the happy sound of it in his ears, he watched the dust settle again in the road, the tall golden poplars close like a screen after the passing wheels, and the distance resume its aspect of radiant loneliness. Nothing was changed at which he looked, yet he was conscious that the rapture had passed from his thoughts and the beauty from the October landscape. The release that he had won appeared to him as an illusion and a cheat, and lifting his face to the sunshine, he watched, like a prisoner, the flight of the swallows across the sky.

At dinner Beverly noticed his abstraction, and recommended a mint julep, which Emily went out immediately to prepare.

"The blood is easily chilled at this season," he said, "and care should be taken to keep it warm by means of a gentle stimulant. I am not a great drinker, sir, as you may have remarked, but in cases either of sickness or sorrow, I have observed that few things are more efficacious than a thimbleful of whiskey taken at the proper time. When I had the misfortune to break to my uncle Colonel Algernon Brooke the distressing news of the death of his wife by drowning, I remember that, though he was one of the most abstemious men alive, his first articulate words were: 'bring the whiskey jug.'"

Even with the cheering assistance of the mint julep, however, it was impossible for Ordway to eat his dinner; and making an excuse presently, he rose from the table and went out into the avenue, where he walked slowly up and down in the shadow of the cedars. At the end of his last restless turn, he went indoors for his hat, and coming out again started rapidly toward Tappahannock. With his first decisive step he felt that the larger share of his burden had fallen from him.

The Tappahannock Hotel was a low, whitewashed frame building, withdrawn slightly from the street, where several dejected looking horses, with saddle-bags attached to them, were usually fastened to the iron rings in the hitching-rail upon the sidewalk. The place was the resort chiefly of commercial travellers or of neighbouring farmers, who drove in with wagon loads of garden produce or of sun-cured tobacco; and the number of loungers reclining on the newly painted green benches upon the porch made Ordway aware that the fall trade was already beginning to show signs of life.

In answer to his questions, the proprietor an unctuous person, whose mouth was distorted by a professional habit of welcome—informed him that a gentleman by the name of Brown had registered there the evening before, and that he was, to the best of his belief, upstairs in number eighteen at the present moment.

"To tell the truth I can't quite size him up," he concluded confidentially. "He don't seem to hev' come either to sell or to buy an' thar's precious little else that ever brings a body to Tappahannock."

"Please add that I wish particularly to see him in private," said Ordway.

Without turning his head the proprietor beckoned, by a movement of his thumb delivered backward over his left shoulder, to a Negro boy, who sat surreptitiously eating peanuts out of a paper bag in his pocket.

"Tell the gentleman in number eighteen, Sol, that Mr. Smith, the people's candidate for Mayor, would like to have a little talk with him in private. I'm mighty glad to see you out in the race, suh," he added, turning again to Ordway, as the Negro disappeared up the staircase.

"Thank you," replied Ordway, with a start, which brought him back from his approaching interview with Gus Wherry to the recollection that he was fighting to become the Mayor of Tappahannock.

"Thar's obleeged to be a scrummage, I reckon," resumed the loquacious little man, when he had received Ordway's acknowledgments—"but I s'pose thar ain't any doubt as to who'll come off with the scalps in the end." His manner changed abruptly, and he looked round with a lurking curiosity in his watery eyes. "You knew Mr. Brown, didn't you say, suh?—before you came here?"

Ordway glanced up quickly.

"Did you tell me he got here yesterday?" he asked.

"Last night on the eight-forty-five, which came in two hours after time."

"An accident on the road, wasn't it?"

"Wreck of a freight—now, Mr. Brown, as I was saying——"

At this instant, to Ordway's relief, the messenger landed with a bound on the floor of the hall, and picking himself up, announced with a cheerful grin, that "the gentleman would be powerful pleased to see Mr. Smith upstairs in his room."

Nodding to the proprietor, Ordway followed the Negro up to the first landing, and knocked at a half open door at the end of the long, dark hall.

CHAPTER VII
Shows That Politeness, Like Charity, Is An Elastic Mantle

WHEN Ordway entered the room, he turned and closed the door carefully behind him, before he advanced to where Wherry stood awaiting him with outstretched hand.

"I can't begin to tell you how I appreciate the honour, Mr. Smith. I didn't expect it—upon my word, I didn't," exclaimed Wherry, with the effusive amiability which made Ordway bite his lip in anger.

"I don't know that I mean it for an honour, but I hope we can get straight to business," returned Ordway shortly.

"Ah, then there's business?" repeated the other, as if in surprise. "I had hoped that you were paying me merely a friendly call. To tell the truth I've the very worst head in the world for business, you know, and I always manage to dodge it whenever I get half a chance."

"Well, you can't dodge it this time, so we may as well have it out."

"Then since you insist upon that awful word 'business,' I suppose you mean that you've come formally to ratify the treaty?" asked Wherry, smiling.

"The treaty? I made no treaty," returned Ordway gravely.

Laughing pleasantly, Wherry invited his visitor to be seated. Then turning away for an instant, he flung himself into a chair beside a little marble topped table upon which stood a half-emptied bottle of rye whiskey and a pitcher of iced water on a metal tray.

"Do you mean to tell me you've forgotten our conversation in that beastly road?" he demanded, "and the prodigal? Surely you haven't forgotten the prodigal? Why, I never heard anything in my life that impressed me more."

"You told me then distinctly that you had no intention of remaining in Tappahannock."

"I'll tell you so again if you'd like to hear it. Will you have a drink?"

Ordway shook his head with an angry gesture.

"What I want to know," he insisted bluntly, "is why you are here at all?"

Wherry poured out a drink of whiskey, and adding a dash of iced water, tossed it down at a swallow.

"I thought I told you then," he answered, "that I have a little private business in the town. As it's purely personal I hope you'll have no objection to my transacting it."

"You said that afternoon that your presence was, in some way, connected with Jasper Trend's cotton mills."

Wherry gave a low whistle. "Did I?" he asked politely, "well, perhaps, I did. I can't remember."

"I was fool enough to believe that you wanted an honest job," said Ordway; "it did not enter my head that your designs were upon Trend's daughter."

"Didn't it?" inquired Wherry with a smile in which his white teeth flashed brilliantly. "Well, it might have, for I was honest enough about it. Didn't I tell you that a woman was at the bottom of every mess I was ever in?"

"Where is your wife?" asked Ordway.

"Dead," replied Wherry, in a solemn voice.

"If I am not mistaken, you had not less than three at the time of your trial."

"All dead," rejoined Wherry in the same solemn tone, while he drew out his pocket handkerchief and wiped his eyes with a flourish, "there ain't many men that have supported such a treble affliction on the same day."

"I may as well inform you that I don't believe a word you utter."

"It's true all the same. I'll take my oath on the biggest Bible you can find in town."

"Your oath? Pshaw!"

"Well, I always said my word was better," observed Wherry, without the slightest appearance of offence. He wore a pink shirt which set off his fine colouring to advantage, and as he turned aside to pour out a second drink of whiskey, Ordway noticed that his fair hair was brushed carefully across the bald spot in the centre of his head.

"Whether they are dead or alive," responded Ordway, "I want you to understand plainly that you are to give up your designs upon Milly Trend or her money."

"So you've had your eye on her yourself?" exclaimed Wherry. "I declare I'm deuced sorry. Why, in thunder, didn't you tell me so last June?"

A mental nausea that was almost like a physical spasm seized Ordway suddenly, and crossing to the window, he stood looking through the half-closed shutters down into the street below, where a covered wagon rolled slowly downhill, the driver following on foot as he offered a bunch of fowls to the shop-keepers upon the sidewalk. Then the hot, stale, tobacco impregnated air came up to his nostrils, and he turned away with a sensation of disgust.

"If you'd only warned me in time—hang it—I'd have cut out and given you the field," declared Wherry in such apparent sincerity that Ordway resisted an impulse to kick him out into the hall. "That's my way. I always like to play fair and square when I get the chance."

"Well, you've got the chance now, and what's more you've got to make it good."

"And leave you the open?"

"And leave me Tappahannock—yes."

"I don't want Tappahannock. To tell the truth I'm not particularly struck by its attractions."

"In that case you've no objection to leaving immediately, I suppose?"

"I've no objection on earth if you'll allow me a pretty woman to keep me company. I'm a deuced lonely bird, and I can't get on by myself—it's not in my nature."

Ordway placed his hand upon the table with a force which started the glasses rattling on the metal tray.

"I repeat for the last time that you are to leave Milly Trend alone," he said. "Do you understand me?"

"I'm not sure I do," rejoined Wherry, still pleasantly enough. "Would you mind saying that over again in a lower tone?"

"What I want to make plain is that you are not to marry Milly Trend—or any other women in this town," returned Ordway angrily.

"So there are others!" commented Wherry jauntily with his eye on the ceiling.

The pose of his handsome head was so remarkably effective, that Ordway felt his rage increased by the mere external advantages of the man.

"What I intend you to do is to leave Tappahannock for good and all this very evening," he resumed, drawing a sharp breath.

The words appeared to afford Wherry unspeakable amusement.

"I can't," he responded, after a minute in which he had enjoyed his humour to the full, "the train leaves at seven-ten and I've an engagement at eight o'clock."

"You'll break it, that's all."

"But it wouldn't be polite—it's with a lady."

"Then I'll break it for you," returned Ordway, starting toward the door, "for I may presume, I suppose, that the lady is Miss Trend?"

"Oh, come back, I say. Hang it all, don't get into a fury," protested Wherry, clutching the other by the arm, and closing the door which he had half opened. "Here, hold on a minute and let's talk things over quietly. I told you, didn't I? that I wanted to be obliging."

"Then you will go?" asked Ordway, in a milder tone.

"Well, I'll think about it. I've a quick enough wit for little things, but on serious matters my brain works slowly. In the first place now didn't we promise each other that we'd play fair?"

"But you haven't—that's why I came here."

"You're dead wrong. I'm doing it this very minute. I'll keep my mouth shut about you till Judgment Day if you'll just hold off and not pull me back when I'm trying to live honest."

"Honest!" exclaimed Ordway, and turned on his heel.

"Well, I'd like to know what you call it, for if it isn't honesty, it certainly isn't pleasure. My wife's dead, I swear it's a fact, and I swear again that I don't mean the girl any harm. I was never so much gone on a woman in my life, though a number of 'em have been pretty soft on me. So you keep off and manage your election—or whatever it is—while I go about my business. Great Scott! after all it ain't as if a woman were a bank note, is it?"

"The first question was mine. Will you leave to-day or will you not?"

"And if I will not what are you going to do about it?"

"As soon as I hear your decision, I shall let you know."

"Well, say I won't. What is your next move then?"

"In that case I shall go straight to the girl's father after I leave this room."

"By Jove you will! And what will you do when you get there?"

"I shall tell him that to the best of my belief you have a wife—possibly several—now living."

"Then you'll lie," said Wherry, dropping for the first time his persuasive tone.

"That remains to be proved," rejoined Ordway shortly. "At any rate if he needs to be convinced I shall tell him as much as I know about you."

"And how much," demanded Wherry insolently, "does that happen to be?"

"Enough to stop the marriage, that is all I want."

"And suppose he asks you—as he probably will—how in the devil it came to be any business of yours?"

For a moment Ordway looked over the whiskey bottle and through the open window into the street below.

"I don't think that will happen," he answered slowly, "but if it does I shall tell him the whole truth as I know it—about myself as well as about you."

"The deuce you will!" exclaimed Wherry. "It appears that you want to take the whole job out of my hands now, doesn't it?"

The flush from the whiskey had overspread his face, and in the midst of the general redness his eyes and teeth flashed brilliantly in an angry laugh. An imaginative sympathy for the man moved Ordway almost in spite of himself, and he wondered, in the long pause, what Wherry's early life had been and if his chance in the world were really a fair one?

"I don't want to be hard on you," said Ordway at last; "it's out of the question that you should have Milly Trend, but if you'll give up that idea and go away I'll do what I can to help you—I'll send you half my salary for the next six months until you are able to find a job."

Wherry looked at him with a deliberate wink.

"So you'd like to save your own skin, after all, wouldn't you?" he inquired.

Taking up his hat from the table, Ordway turned toward the door and laid his hand upon the knob before he spoke.

"Is it decided then that I shall go to Jasper Trend?" he asked.

"Well, I wouldn't if I were you," said Wherry, "but that's your affair. On the whole I think that you'll pay more than your share of the price."

"It's natural, I suppose, that you should want your revenge," returned Ordway, without resentment, "but all the same I shall tell him as little as possible about your past. What I shall say is that I have reason to believe that your wife is still living."

"One or more?" enquired Wherry, with a sneer.

"One, I think, will prove quite sufficient for my purpose."

"Well, go ahead," rejoined Wherry, angrily, "but before you strike you'd better be pretty sure you see a snake in the grass. I'd advise you for your own sake to ask Milly Trend first if she expects to marry me."

"What?" cried Ordway, wheeling round, "do you mean she has refused you?"

"Oh, ask her—ask her," retorted Wherry airily, as he turned back to the whiskey bottle.

In the street, a moment later, Ordway passed under the red flag, which, inflated by the wind, swelled triumphantly above his head. From the opposite sidewalk a man spoke to him; and then, turning, waved his slouch hat enthusiastically toward the flag. "If he only knew," thought Ordway, looking after him; and the words brought to his imagination what disgrace in Tappahannock would mean in his life. As he passed the dim vacancy of the warehouse he threw toward it a look which was almost one of entreaty. "No, no, it can't be," he insisted, as if to reassure himself, "it is impossible. How could it happen?" And seized by a sudden rage against circumstances, he remembered the windy afternoon upon which he had come for the first time to Tappahannock—the wide stretches of broomsedge; the pale red road, which appeared to lead nowhere; his violent hunger; and the Negro woman who had given him the cornbread at the door of her cabin. A hundred years seemed to have passed since then—no, not a hundred years as men count them, but a dissolution and a resurrection. It was as if his personality—his whole inner structure had dissolved and renewed itself again; and when he thought now of that March afternoon it was with the visual distinctness that belongs to an observer rather than to an actor. His point of view was detached, almost remote. He saw himself from the outside alone—his clothes, his face, even his gestures; and these things were as vivid to him as were the Negro cabin, the red clay road, and the covered wagon that threw its shadow on the path as it crawled by. In no way could he associate his immediate personality either with the scene or with the man who had sat on the pine bench ravenously eating the coarse food. At the moment it seemed to him that he was released, not only from any spiritual bondage to the past, but even from any physical connection with the man he had been then. "What have I to do with Gus Wherry or with Daniel Ordway?" he demanded. "Above all, what in heaven have I to do with Milly Trend?" As he asked the question he flushed with resentment against the girl for whom he was about to sacrifice all that he valued in his life. He thought with disgust of her vanity, her shallowness, her insincerity; and the course that he had planned showed in this sudden light as utterly unreasonable. It struck him on the instant that in going to Wherry he had been a fool. "Yes, I should have thought of that before. I have been too hasty, for what, after all, have I to do with Milly Trend?"

With an effort he put the question aside, and in the emotional reaction which followed, he felt that his spirit soared into the blue October sky. Emily, looking at him at dinner, thought that she had never seen him so animated, so light-hearted, so boyishly unreserved. When his game of dominoes with Beverly was over, he followed the children out into the orchard, where they were gathering apples into great straw hampers; and as he stood under the fragrant clustering boughs, with the childish laughter in his ears, he felt that his perplexities, his troubles, even his memories had dissolved and vanished into air. An irresponsible happiness swelled in his heart while he watched the golden orchard grass blown like a fringe upon the circular outline of the hill.

But when night fell the joy of the sunshine went from him, and it was almost with a feeling of heaviness that he lit his lamp and sat down in the chintz-covered chair under the faded sampler worked by Margaret, aged nine. Without apparent cause or outward disturbance he had passed from the exhilaration of the afternoon into a pensive, almost a melancholy mood. The past, which had been so remote for several hours, had leaped suddenly to life again—not only in his memory, but in every fibre of his body as well as in every breath he drew. "No, I cannot escape it, for is it not a part of me—it is I myself," he thought; and he knew that he could no more free himself from his duty to Milly Trend than he could tear the knowledge of her existence from his brain. "After all, it is not Milly Trend," he added, "it is something larger, stronger, far more vital than she."

A big white moth flew in from the dusk, and fluttered blindly in the circle of light which the lamp threw on the ceiling. He heard the soft whirring of its wings against the plaster, and gradually the sound entered into his thoughts and became a part of his reflections. "Will the moth fall into the flame or will it escape?" he asked, feeling himself powerless to avert the creature's fate. In some strange way his own destiny seemed to be whirling dizzily in that narrow circle of light; and in the pitiless illumination that surrounded it, he saw not only all that was passed, but all that was present as well as all that was yet to come. At the same instant he saw his mother's face as she lay dead with her look of joyous surprise frozen upon her lips; and the face of Lydia when she had lowered a black veil at their last parting; and the face of Alice, his daughter; and of the girl downstairs as he had seen her through the gray twilight; and the face of the epileptic little preacher, who had preached in the prison chapel. And as these faces looked back at him he knew that the illumination in which his soul had struggled so blindly was the light of love. "Yes, it is love," he thought, "and that is the meaning of the circle of light into which I have come out of the darkness."

He looked up startled, for the white moth, after one last delirious whirl of ecstasy, had dropped from the ceiling into the flame of the lamp.

CHAPTER VIII
The Turn Of The Wheel

AT eight o'clock the next morning Ordway entered Jasper Trend's gate, and passed up the gravelled walk between borders of white and yellow chrysanthemums. In a window on his right a canary was singing loudly in a gilt cage; and a moment later, the maid invited him into a room which seemed, as he entered it, to be filled with a jubilant burst of music. As he waited here for the man he had come to see, he felt that, in spite of his terrible purpose, he had found no place in Tappahannock so cheerful as this long room flooded with sunshine, in the midst of which the canary swung back and forth in his wire cage. The furniture was crude enough, the colours of the rugs were unharmonious, the imitation lace of the curtains was offensive to his eyes. Yet the room was made almost attractive by the large windows which gave on the piazza, the borders of chrysanthemums and the smoothly shaven plot of lawn.

His back was turned toward the door when it opened and shut quickly, and Jasper Trend came in, hastily swallowing his last mouthful of breakfast.

"You wanted to see me, Mr. Smith, I understand," he said at once, showing in his manner a mixture of curiosity and resentment. It was evident at the first glance that even in his own house he was unable to overcome the political antagonism of the man of little stature. The smallest social amenity he would probably have regarded as a kind of moral subterfuge.

"I must ask you to overlook the intimate nature of my question," began Ordway, in a voice which was so repressed that it sounded dull and lifeless, "but I have heard that your daughter intends to marry Horatio Brown. Is this true?"

At the words Jasper, who had prepared himself for a political onslaught, fell back a step or two and stood in the merciless sunlight, blinking at his questioner with his little, watery, pale gray eyes. Each dull red vein in his long nose became suddenly prominent.

"Horatio Brown?" he repeated, "why, I thought you'd come about nothing less than the nomination. What in the devil do you want anyway with Horatio Brown. He can't vote in Tappahannock, can he?"

"I'll answer that in time," replied Ordway, "my motive is more serious than you can possibly realise—it is a question which involves your daughter's happiness—perhaps her life."

"Good Lord, is that so?" exclaimed Jasper, "I don't reckon you're sweet on her yourself, are you?"

Ordway's only reply was an impatient groan which sent the other stumbling back against a jar of goldfish on the centre table. Though he had come fully prepared for the ultimate sacrifice, he was unable to control the repulsion aroused in him by the bleared eyes and sunken mouth of the man before him.

"Well, if you ain't," resumed Jasper presently, with a fresh outburst of hilarity, "you're about the only male critter in Tappahannock that don't turn his eyes sooner or later toward my door."

"I've barely a speaking acquaintance with your daughter," returned Ordway shortly, "but her reputation as a beauty is certainly very well deserved."

Mollified by the compliment, Jasper unbent so far as to make an abrupt, jerky motion in the direction of a chair; but shaking his head, Ordway put again bluntly the question he had asked upon the other's entrance.

"Am I to understand seriously that she means to marry Brown?" he demanded.

Jasper twisted his scraggy neck nervously in his loose collar. "Lord, how you do hear things!" he ejaculated. "Now, as far as I can see, thar ain't a single word of truth in all that talk. Just between you and me I don't believe my girl has had her mind on that fellow Brown more'n a minute. I'm dead against it and that'll go a long way with her, you may be sure. Why, only this morning she told me that if she had to choose between the two of 'em, she'd stick to young Banks every time."

With the words it seemed to Ordway that the sunshine became fairly dazzling as it fell through the windows, while the song of the canary went up rapturously like a pÆan. Only by the relief which flooded his heart like warmth could he measure the extent of the ruin he had escaped. Even Jasper Trend's face appeared no longer hideous to him, and as he held out his hand, the exhilaration of his release lent a note that was almost one of affection to his voice.

"Don't let her do it—for God's sake don't let her do it," he said, and an instant afterward he was out on the gravelled walk between the borders of white and yellow chrysanthemums.

At the gate Milly was standing with a letter in her hand, and when he spoke to her, he watched her face change slowly to the colour of a flower. Never had she appeared softer, prettier, more enticing in his eyes, and he felt for the first time an understanding of the hopeless subjection of Banks.

"Oh, it's you, Mr. Smith!" she exclaimed, smiling and blushing as she had smiled and blushed at Wherry the day before, "I was asking Harry Banks yesterday what had become of you?"

"What had become of me?" he repeated in surprise, while he drew back quickly with his hand on the latch of the gate.

"I hadn't seen you for so long," she answered, with a laugh which bore less relation to humour than it did to pleasure. "You used to pass by five times a day, and I got so accustomed to you that I really missed you when you went away."

"Well, I've been in the country all summer, though that hardly counts, for you were out of town yourself."

"Yes, I was out of town myself." She lingered over the words, and her voice softened as she went on until it seemed to flow with the sweetness of liquid honey, "but even when I am here, you never care to see me."

"Do you think so?" he asked gaily, and the next instant he wondered why the question had passed his lips before it had entered into his thoughts, "the truth is that I know a good deal more about you than you suspect," he added; "I have the honour, you see, to be the confidant of Harry Banks."

"Oh, Harry Banks!" she exclaimed indifferently, as she turned from the gate, while Ordway opened it and passed out into the street.

For the next day or two it seemed to him that the lightness of his heart was reflected in the faces of those about him—that Baxter, Mrs. Brooke, Emily, Beverly each appeared to move in response to some hidden spring within himself. He felt no longer either Beverly's tediousness or Mrs. Brooke's melancholy, for these early October mornings contained a rapture which transfigured the people with whom he lived.

With this unlooked for renewal of hope he threw himself eagerly into the political fight for the control of Tappahannock. It was now Tuesday and on Thursday evening he was to deliver his first speech in the town hall. Already the preparations were made, already the flags were flying from the galleries, and already Baxter had been trimmed for his public appearance upon the platform.

"By George, I believe the Major's right and it's the Ten Commandment part that has done it," said the big man, settling his person with a shake in the new clothes he had purchased for the occasion. "I reckon this coat's all right, Smith, ain't it? My wife wouldn't let me come out on the platform in those old clothes I've been wearing."

"Oh, you're all right," returned Ordway, cheerfully—so cheerfully that Baxter was struck afresh by the peculiar charm which belonged less to manner than to temperament, "you're all right, old man, but it isn't your clothes that make you so."

"All the same I'll feel better when I get into my old suit again," said Baxter, "I don't know how it is, but, somehow, I seem to have left two-thirds of myself behind in those old clothes. I just wore these down to show 'em off, but I shan't put 'em on again till Thursday."

It was the closing hour at the warehouse, and after a few eager words on the subject of the approaching meeting, Ordway left the office and went out into the deserted building where the old Negro was sweeping the floor with his twig broom. A moment later he was about to pass under the archway, when a man, hurrying in from the street, ran straight into his arms and then staggered back with a laugh of mirthless apology.

"My God, Smith," said the tragic voice of Banks, "I'm half crazy and I must have a word with you alone."

Catching his arm Ordway drew him into the dim light of the warehouse, until they reached the shelter of an old wagon standing unhitched against the wall. The only sound which came to them here was the scratching noise made by the twig broom on the rough planks of the floor.

"Speak now," said Ordway, while his heart sank as he looked into the other's face, "It's quite safe—there's no one about but old Abraham."

"I can't speak," returned Banks, preserving with an effort a decent composure of his features, "but it's all up with me—it's worse than I imagined, and there's nothing ahead of me but death."

"I suppose it's small consolation to be told that you look unusually healthy at the minute," replied Ordway, "but don't keep me guessing, Banks. What's happened now?"

"All her indifference—all her pretence of flirting was pure deception," groaned the miserable Banks, "she wanted to throw dust, not only in my eyes, but in Jasper's, also."

"Why, he told me with his own lips that his daughter had given him to understand that she preferred you to Brown."

"And so she did give him to understand—so she did," affirmed Banks, in despair, "but it was all a blind so that he wouldn't make trouble between her and Brown. I tell you, Smith," he concluded, bringing his clenched fist down on the wheel of the wagon, from which a shower of dried mud was scattered into Ordway's face, "I tell you, I don't believe women think any more of telling a lie than we do of taking a cocktail!"

"But how do you know all this, my dear fellow? and when did you discover it?"

"That's the awful part, I'm coming to it." His voice gave out and he swallowed a lump in his throat before he could go on. "Oh, Smith, Smith, I declare, if it's the last word I speak, I believe she means to run away with Brown this very evening!"

"What?" cried Ordway, hardly raising his voice above a whisper. A burning resentment, almost a repulsion swept over him, and he felt that he could have spurned the girl's silly beauty if she had lain at his feet. What was a woman like Milly Trend worth, that she should cost him, a stranger to her, so great a price?

"Tell me all," he said sharply, turning again to his companion. "How did you hear it? Why do you believe it? Have you spoken to Jasper?"

Banks blinked hard for a minute, while a single large round teardrop trickled slowly down his freckled nose.

"I should never have suspected it," he answered, "but for Milly's old black Mammy Delphy, who has lived with her ever since she was born. Aunt Delphy came upon her this morning when she was packing her bag, and by hook or crook, heaven knows how, she managed to get at the truth. Then she came directly to me, for it seems that she hates Brown worse than the devil."

"When did she come to you?"

"A half hour ago. I left her and rushed straight to you."

Ordway drew out his watch, and stood looking at the face of it with a wondering frown.

"That must have been five o'clock," he said, "and it is now half past. Shall I catch Milly, do you think, if I start at once?"

"You?" cried Banks, "you mean that you will stop her?"

"I mean that I must stop her. There is no question."

As he spoke he had started quickly down the warehouse, scattering as he walked, a pile of trash which the old Negro had swept together in the centre of the floor. So rapid were the long strides with which he moved that Banks, in spite of his frantic haste, could barely keep in step with him as they passed into the street. Ordway's face had changed as if from a spasm of physical pain, and as Banks looked at it in the afternoon light he was startled to find that it was the face of an old man. The brows were bent, the mouth drawn, the skin sallow, and the gray hair upon the temples had become suddenly more prominent than the dark locks above.

"Then you knew Brown before?" asked Banks, with an accession of courage, as they slackened their pace with the beginning of the hill.

"I knew him before—yes," replied Ordway, shortly. His reserve had become not only a mask, but a coffin, and his companion had for a minute a sensation that was almost uncanny as he walked by his side—as if he were striving to keep pace uphill with a dead man. Banks had known him to be silent, gloomy, uncommunicative before now, but he had never until this instant seen that look of iron resolve which was too cold and still to approach the heat of passion. Had he been furious Banks might have shared his fury with him; had he shown bitterness of mood Banks might have been bitter also; had he given way even to sardonic merriment, Banks felt that it would have been possible to have feigned a mild hilarity of manner; but before this swift, implacable pursuit of something he could not comprehend, the wretched lover lost all consciousness of the part which he himself must act, well or ill, in the event to come.

At Trend's gate Ordway stopped and looked at his companion with a smile which appeared to throw an artificial light upon his drawn features.

"Will you let me speak to her alone first," he asked, "for a few minutes?"

"I'll take a turn up the street then," returned Banks eagerly, still panting from his hurried walk up the long hill. "She's in the room on the right now," he added, "I can see her feeding the canary."

Ordway nodded indifferently. "I shan't be long," he said, and going inside the gate, passed deliberately up the walk and into the room where Milly stood at the window with her mouth close against the wires of the gilt cage.

At his step on the threshold the girl turned quickly toward the door with a fluttering movement. Surprise and disappointment battled for an instant in her glance, and he gathered from his first look that he had come at the moment when she was expecting Wherry. He noticed, too, that in spite of the mild autumn weather, she wore a dark dress which was not unsuitable for a long journey, and that her sailor hat, from which a blue veil floated, lay on a chair in one corner. A deeper meaning had entered into the shallow prettiness of her face, and he felt that she had passed through some subtle change in which she had left her girlhood behind her. For the first time it occurred to him that Milly Trend was deserving not only of passion, but of sympathy.

At the withdrawal of the lips that had offered him his bit of cake, the canary fluttered from his perch and uttered a sweet, short, questioning note; and in Milly's face, as she came forward, there was something of this birdlike, palpitating entreaty.

"Oh, it is you, Mr. Smith," she said, "I did not hear your ring."

"I didn't ring," responded Ordway, as he took her trembling outstretched hand in which she still held the bit of sponge cake, "I saw you at the window so I came straight in without sending word. What I have to say to you is so important that I dared not lose a minute."

"And it is about me?" asked Milly, with a quiver of her eyelids.

"No, it is about someone else, though it concerns you in a measure. The thing I have to tell you relates directly to a man whom you know as Horatio Brown——"

He spoke so quickly that the girl divined his meaning from his face rather than from his words.

"Then you know him?" she questioned, in a frightened whisper.

"I know more of his life than I can tell you. It is sufficient to say that to the best of my belief he has a wife now living—that he has been married before this under different names to at least two living women——"

He stopped and put out his hand with an impulsive protecting gesture, for the wounded vanity in the girl's face had pierced to his heart. "Will you let me see your father?" he asked gently, "would it not be better for me to speak to him instead of to you?"

"No, no!" cried Milly sharply, "don't tell him—don't dare to tell him—for he would believe it and it is a lie—it is a lie! I tell you it is a lie!"

"As God is my witness it is the truth," he answered, without resentment.

"Then you shall accuse him to his face. He is coming in a little while, and you shall accuse him before me——"

She stopped breathlessly and the pity in his look made her wince sharply and shrink away. With her movement the piece of sponge cake fell from her loosened fingers and rolled on the floor at her feet.

"But if it were true how could you know it?" she demanded. "No, it is not true—I don't believe it! I don't believe it!" she repeated in a passion of terror.

At her excited voice the canary, swinging on his perch, broke suddenly into an ecstasy of song, and Milly's words, when she spoke again, were drowned in the liquid sweetness that flowed from the cage. For a minute Ordway stood in silence waiting for the music to end, while he watched the angry, helpless tremor of the girl's outstretched hands.

"Will you promise me to wait?" he asked, raising his voice in the effort to be heard, "will you promise me to wait at least until you find out the truth or the falsehood of what I tell you?"

"But I don't believe it," repeated Milly in the stubborn misery of hopeless innocence.

"Ask yourself, then, what possible reason I could have in coming to you—except to save you?"

"Wait!" cried the girl angrily, "I can't hear—wait!" Picking up a shawl from a chair, she flung it with an impatient gesture over the cage, and turning immediately from the extinguished bird, took up his sentence where he had broken off.

"To save me?" she repeated, "you mean from marriage?"

"From a marriage that would be no marriage. Am I right in suspecting that you meant to go away with him to-night?"

She bowed her head—all the violent spirit gone out of her. "I was ready to go to-night," she answered, like a child that has been hurt and is still afraid of what is to come.

"And you promise me that you will give it up?" he went on gently.

"I don't know—I can't tell—I must see him first," she said, and burst suddenly into tears, hiding her face in her hands with a pathetic, shamed gesture.

Turning away for a moment, he stood blankly staring down into the jar of goldfish. Then, as her sobs grew presently beyond her control, he came back to the chair into which she had dropped and looked with moist eyes at her bowed fair head.

"Before I leave you, will you promise me to give him up?—to forget him if it be possible?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IX
At The Cross-roads

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

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

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

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

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

When he came at last to the place where the two roads crossed before the ruined gate, he stopped short, while the tumult died gradually in his brain, and the agony through which he had just passed appeared as a frenzy to his saner judgment. Looking up a moment later as he was about to enter the avenue, he saw that Emily Brooke was walking toward him under the heavy shadow of the cedars. In the first movement of her surprise the mask which she had always worn in his presence dropped from her face, and as she stepped from the gloom into the sunlight, he felt that the sweetness of her look bent over him like protecting wings. For a single instant, as her eyes gazed wide open into his, he saw reflected in them the visions from which his soul had shrunk back formerly abashed. Nothing had changed in her since yesterday; she was outwardly the same brave and simple woman, with her radiant smile, her blown hair, and her roughened hands. Yet because of that revealing look she appeared no longer human in his eyes, but something almost unearthly bright and distant, like the sunshine he had followed so often through the bars of his prison cell.

"You are suffering," she said, when he would have passed on, and he felt that she had divined without words all that he could not utter.

"Don't pity me," he answered, smiling at her question, because to smile had become for him the easier part of habit, "I'm not above liking pity, but it isn't exactly what I need. And besides, I told you once, you know, that whatever happened to me would always be the outcome of my own failure."

"Yes, I remember you told me so—but does that make it any easier to bear?"

"Easier to bear?—no, but I don't think the chief end of things is to be easy, do you?"

She shook her head. "But isn't our chief end just to make them easier for others?" she asked.

The pity in her face was like an illumination, and her features were enkindled with a beauty he had never found in them before. It was the elemental motherhood in her nature that he had touched; and he felt as he watched her that this ecstasy of tenderness swelled in her bosom and overflowed her lips. Confession to her would have been for him the supreme luxury of despair; but because his heart strained toward her, he drew back and turned his eyes to the road, which stretched solitary and dim beyond them.

"Well, I suppose, I've got what I deserved," he said, "the price that a man pays for being a fool, he pays but once and that is his whole life long."

"But it ought not to be so—it is not just," she answered.

"Just?" he repeated, bitterly, "no, I dare say, it isn't—but the facts of life don't trouble themselves about justice, do they? Is it just, for instance, that you should slave your youth away on your brother's farm, while he sits and plays dominoes on the porch? Is it just that with the instinct for luxury in your blood you should be condemned to a poverty so terrible as this?" He reached out and touched the little red hand hanging at her side. "Is this just?" he questioned with an ironical smile.

"There is some reason for it," she answered bravely, "I feel it though I cannot see it."

"Some reason—yes, but that reason is not justice—not the little human justice that we can call by the name. It's something infinitely bigger than any idea that we have known."

"I can trust," she said softly, "but I can't reason."

"Don't reason—don't even attempt to—let God run his world. Do you think if we didn't believe in the meaning—in the purpose of it all that you and I could stand together here like this? It's because we believe that we can be happy even while we suffer."

"Then you will be happy again—to-morrow?"

"Surely. Perhaps to-night—who knows? I've had a shock. My brain is whirling and I can't see straight. In a little while it will be over and I shall steady down."

"But I should like to help you now while it lasts," she said.

"You are helping me—it's a mercy that you stand there and listen to my wild talk. Do you know I was telling myself as I came along the road just now that there wasn't a living soul to whom I should dare to say that I was in a quake of fear."

"A quake of fear?" She looked at him with swimming eyes, and by that look he saw that she loved him. If he had stretched out his arms, he knew that the passion of her sorrow would have swept her to his breast; and he felt that every fibre of his starved soul and body cried out for the divine food that she offered. At the moment he did not stop to ask himself whether it was his flesh or his spirit that hungered after her, for his whole being had dissolved into the longing which drew him as with cords to her lips. All he understood at the instant was that in his terrible loneliness love had been offered him and he must refuse the gift. A thought passed like a drawn sword between them, and he saw in his imagination Lydia lowering her black veil at their last parting.

"It's a kind of cowardliness, I suppose," he went on with his eyes on the ground, "but I was thinking that minute how greatly I needed help and how much—how very much—you had given me. If I ever learn really to live it will be because of you—because of your wonderful courage, your unfailing sweetness——"

For the first time he saw in her face the consciousness of her own unfulfilment. "If you only knew how often I wonder if it is worth while," she answered.

At this he made a sudden start forward and then checked himself. "The chief tragedy in my life," he said, "is that I knew you twenty years too late."

Until his words were uttered he did not realise how much of a confession he had put into them; and with the discovery he watched her face bloom softly like a flower that opens its closed petals.

"If I could have helped you then, why cannot I help you now?" she asked, while the innocence in her look humbled him more than a divine fury would have done. The larger his ideal of her became, the keener grew his sense of failure—of bondage to that dead past from which he could never release his living body. As he looked at her now he realised that the supreme thing he had missed in life was the control of the power which lies in simple goodness; and the purity of Lydia appeared to him as a shining blank—an unwritten surface beside the passionate humanity in the heart of the girl before him.

"You will hear things from others which I can't tell you and then you will understand," he said.

"I shall hear nothing that will make me cease to believe in you," she answered.

"You will hear that I have done wrong in my life and you will understand that if I have suffered it has been by my own fault."

She met his gaze without wavering.

"I shall still believe in you," she responded.

Her eyes were on his face and she saw that the wan light of the afterglow revealed the angularities of his brow and chin and filled in with shadows the deeper hollows in his temples. The smile on his lips was almost ironical as he answered.

"Those from whom I might have expected loyalty, fell away from me—my father, my wife, my children——"

"To believe against belief is a woman's virtue," she responded, "but at least it is a virtue."

"You mean that you would have been my friend through everything?" he asked quickly, half blinded by the ideal which seemed to flash so closely to his eyelids.

There was scorn in her voice as she answered: "If I had been your friend once—yes, a thousand times."

Before his inward vision there rose the conception of a love that would have pardoned, blessed and purified. Bending his head he kissed her little cold hand once and let it fall. Then without looking again into her face, he entered the avenue and went on alone.

CHAPTER X
Between Man And Man

WHEN he entered Tappahannock the following morning, he saw with surprise that the red flag was still flying above the street. As he looked into the face of the first man he met, he felt a sensation of relief, almost of gratitude because he received merely the usual morning greeting; and the instant afterward he flinched and hesitated before replying to the friendly nod of the harness-maker, stretching himself under the hanging bridles in the door of the little shop.

Entering the warehouse he glanced nervously down the deserted building, and when a moment later he opened the door into Baxter's office, he grew hot at the familiar sight of the local newspaper in his employer's hands. The years had divided suddenly and he saw again the crowd in Fifth Avenue as he walked home on the morning of his arrest. He smelt the smoke of the great city; he heard the sharp street cries around him; and he pushed aside the fading violets offered him by the crippled flower seller at the corner. He even remembered, without effort, the particular bit of scandal retailed to him over a cigar by the club wit who had joined him. All his sensations to-day were what they had been then, only now his consciousness was less acute, as if the edge of his perceptions had been blunted by the force of the former blow.

"Howdy, Smith, is that you?" remarked Baxter, crushing the top of the paper beneath the weight of his chin as he looked over it at Ordway. "Did you meet Banks as you came in? He was in here asking for you not two minutes ago."

"Banks? No, I didn't see him. What did he want?" As he put the ordinary question the dull level of his voice surprised him.

"Oh, he didn't tell me," returned Baxter, "but it was some love-lorn whining he had to do, I reckon. Now what I can't understand is how a man can be so narrow sighted as only to see one woman out of the whole bouncing sex of 'em. It would take more than a refusal—it would take a downright football to knock out my heart. Good Lord! in this world of fine an' middling fine women, the trouble ain't to get the one you want, but to keep on wanting the one you get. I've done my little share of observing in my time, and what I've learned from it is that the biggest trial a man can have is not to want another man's wife, but to want to want his own."

A knock at the door called Ordway out into the warehouse, where he yielded himself immediately to the persuasive voice of Banks.

"Come back here a minute, will you, out of hearing? I tried to get to you last night and couldn't."

"Has anything gone wrong?" inquired Ordway, following the other to a safe distance from Baxter's office. At first he had hardly had courage to lift his eyes to Banks' face, but reassured by the quiet opening of the conversation, he stood now with his sad gaze fixed on the beaming freckled features of the melancholy lover.

"I only wanted to tell you that she didn't go," whispered Banks, rolling his prominent eyes into the dusky recesses of the warehouse, "she's ill in bed to-day, and Brown left town on the eight-forty-five this morning."

"So he's gone for good!" exclaimed Ordway, and drew a long breath as if he had been released from an emotional tension which had suspended, while it lasted, the ordinary movement of life. Since he had prepared himself for the worst was it possible that his terror of yesterday would scatter to-day like the delusions of an unsettled brain? Had Wherry held back in mercy or had Milly Trend? Even if he were spared now must he still live on here unaware how widely—or how pitifully—his secret was known? Would this ceaseless dread of discovery prove again, as it had proved in the past, more terrible even than the discovery itself? Would he be able to look fearlessly at Milly Trend again?—at Baxter? at Banks? at Emily?

"Well, I've got to thank you for it, Smith?" said Banks. "How you stopped it, I don't know for the life of me, but stop it you did."

The cheerful selfishness in such rejoicing struck Ordway even in the midst of his own bitter musing. Though Banks adored Milly, soul and body, he was frankly jubilant over the tragic ending of her short romance.

"I hope there's little danger of its beginning anew," Ordway remarked presently, with less sympathy than he would have shown his friend twelve hours before.

"I suppose you wouldn't like to tell me what you said to her?" inquired Banks, his customary awe of his companion swept away in the momentary swing of his elation.

"No, I shouldn't like to tell you," returned Ordway quietly.

"Then it's all right, of course, and I'll be off to drape the town hall in bunting for to-morrow night. We're going to make the biggest political display for you that Tappahannock has ever seen."

At the instant Ordway was hardly conscious of the immensity of his relief, but some hours later, after the early closing of the warehouse, when he walked slowly back along the road to Cedar Hill, it seemed to him that his life had settled again into its quiet monotonous spaces. The peaceful fields on either side, with their short crop of live-ever-lasting, in which a few lonely sheep were browsing, appeared to him now as a part of the inward breadth and calm of the years that he had spent in Tappahannock.

In the loneliness of the road he could tell himself that the fear of Gus Wherry was gone for a time at least, yet the next day upon going into town he was aware of the same nervous shrinking from the people he passed, from the planters hanging about the warehouse, from Baxter buried behind his local newspaper.

"They've got a piece as long as your arm about you in the Tappahannock Herald, Smith," cried Baxter, chuckling; and Ordway felt himself redden painfully with apprehension. Not until the evening, when he came out upon the platform under the floating buntings in the town hall, did he regain entirely the self-possession which he had lost in the presence of Milly Trend.

In its white and red decorations, with the extravagant glare of its gas-jets, the hall had assumed almost a festive appearance; and as Ordway glanced at the crowded benches and doorways, he forgot the trivial political purpose he was to serve, in the more human relation in which he stood to the men who had gathered to hear him speak. These men were his friends, and if they believed in him he felt a triumphant conviction that they had seen their belief justified day by day, hour by hour, since he had come among them. In the crowd of faces before him, he recognised, here and there, workingmen whom he had helped—operatives in Jasper Trend's cotton mills, or in the smaller factories which combined with the larger to create the political situation in Tappahannock. Closer at hand he saw the shining red face of Major Leary; the affectionate freckled face of Banks; the massive benevolent face of Baxter. As he looked at them an emotion which was almost one of love stirred in his breast, and he felt the words he had prepared dissolve and fade from his memory to reunite in an appeal of which he had not thought until this minute. There was something, he knew now, for him to say to-night—something so infinitely large that he could utter it only because it rose like love or sorrow to his lips. Of all the solemn moments when he had stood before these men, with his open Bible, in the green field or in the little grove of pines, there was none so solemn, he felt, as the approaching instant in which he would speak to them no longer as a man to children, but as a man to men.

On the stage before him Baxter was addressing the house, his soft, persuasive voice mingling with a sympathetic murmur from the floor. The applause which had broken out at Ordway's entrance had not yet died away, and with each mention of his name, with each allusion to his services to Tappahannock, it burst forth again, enthusiastic, irrepressible, overwhelming. Never before, it seemed to him, sitting there on the platform with his roughened hands crossed on his knees, had he felt himself to be so intimately a part of the community in which he lived. Never before—not even when he had started this man in life, had bought off that one's mortgage or had helped another to struggle free of drink, had he come quite so near to the pathetic individual lives that compose the mass. They loved him, they believed in him, and they were justified! At the moment it seemed to him nothing—less than nothing—that they should make him Mayor of Tappahannock. In this one instant of understanding they had given him more than any office—than any honour.

While he sat there outwardly so still, so confident of his success, it seemed to him that in the exhilaration of the hour he was possessed of a new and singularly penetrating insight into life. Not only did he see further and deeper than he had ever seen before, but he looked beyond the beginning of things into the causes and beyond the ending of them into the results. He saw himself and why he was himself as clearly as he saw his sin and why he had sinned. Out of their obscurity his father and his mother returned to him, and as he met the bitter ironical smile of the one and the curved black brows and red, half open mouth of the other, he knew himself to be equally the child of each, for he understood at last why he was a mixture of strength and weakness, of gaiety and sadness, of bitterness and compassion. His short, troubled childhood rushed through his thoughts, and with that swiftness of memory which comes so often in tragic moments, he lived over again—not separately and in successive instants—but fully, vitally, and in all the freshness of experience, the three events which he saw now, in looking back, as the milestones upon his road. Again he saw his mother as she lay in her coffin, with her curved black brows and half open mouth frozen into a joyous look, and in that single fleeting instant he passed through his meeting with the convict at the wayside station, and through the long suspended minutes when he had waited in the Stock Exchange for the rise in the market which did not come. And these things appeared to him, not as detached and obscure remnants of his past, but clear and delicate and vivid as if they were projected in living colours against the illumination of his mind. They were there not to bewilder, but to make plain; not to accuse, but to vindicate. "Everything is clear to me now and I see it all," he thought, "and if I can only keep this penetration of vision nothing will be harder to-morrow than it is to-night." In his whole life there was not an incident too small for him to remember it and to feel that it was significant of all the rest; and he knew that if he could have seen from the beginning as clearly as he saw to-night, his past would not have been merely different, it would have been entirely another than his own.

Baxter had stopped, and turning with an embarrassed upheaval of his whole body, he spoke to Ordway, who rose at his words and came slowly forward to the centre of the stage. A hoarse murmur, followed by a tumult of shouts, greeted him, while he stood for a moment looking silently among those upturned faces for the faces of the men to whom he must speak. "That one will listen because I nursed him back to life, and that one because I brought him out of ruin—and that one and that one—" He knew them each by name, and as his gaze travelled from man to man he felt that he was seeking a refuge from some impending evil in the shelter of the good deeds that he had done.

Though he held a paper in his hand, he did not look at it, for he had found his words in that instant of illumination when, seated upon the stage, he had seen the meaning of his whole life made plain. The present event and the issue of it no longer concerned him; he had ceased to fear, even to shrink from the punishment that was yet to come. In the completeness with which he yielded himself to the moment, he felt that he was possessed of the calm, almost of the power of necessity; and he experienced suddenly the sensation of being lifted and swept forward on one of the high waves of life. He spoke rapidly, without effort, almost without consciousness of the words he uttered, until it seemed to him presently that it was the torrent of his speech which carried him outward and upward with that strange sense of lightness, of security. And this lightness, this security belonged not to him, but to some outside current of being.

His speech was over, and he had spoken to these factory workers as no man had spoken before him in Tappahannock. With his last word the silence had held tight and strained for a minute, and then the grateful faces pressed round him and the ringing cheers passed through the open windows out into the street. His body was still trembling, but as he stood there with his sparkling blue eyes on the house, he looked gay and boyish. He had made his mark, he had spoken his best speech, and he had touched not merely the factory toilers in Tappahannock, but that common pulse of feeling in which all humanity is made one. Then the next instant, while he still waited, he was aware of a new movement upon the platform behind him, and a man came forward and stopped short under the gas jet, which threw a flickering yellow light upon his face. Though he had seen him but once, he recognized him instantly as the short, long-nosed, irascible manager of the cotton mills, and with the first glance into his face he had heard already the unspoken question and the reply.

"May I ask you, Mr. Smith," began the little man, suddenly, "if you can prove your right to vote or to hold office in Virginia?"

Ordway's gaze passed beyond him to rest upon Baxter and Major Leary, who sat close together, genial, elated, rather thirsty. At the moment he felt sorry for Baxter—not for himself.

"No," he answered with a smile which threw a humorous light upon the question, "I cannot—can you prove yours?"

The little man cleared his throat with a sniffling sound, and when he spoke again it was in a high nasal voice, as if he had become suddenly very excited or very angry.

"Is your name Daniel Smith?" he asked, with a short laugh.

The question was out at last and the silence in which Ordway stood was like the suspension between thought and thought. All at once he found himself wondering why he had lived in hourly terror of this instant, for now that it was upon him, he saw that it was no more tragic, no less commonplace, than the most ordinary instant of his life. As in the past his courage had revived in him with the first need of decisive action, so he felt it revive now, and lifting his head, he looked straight into the angry, little eyes of the man who waited, under the yellow gaslight, on the platform before him.

"My name," he answered, still smiling, "is Daniel Ordway."

There was no confusion in his mind, no anxiety, no resentment. Instead the wonderful brightness of a moment ago still shone in his thoughts, and while he appeared to rest his sparkling gaze on the face of his questioner, he was seeing, in reality, the road by which he had come to Tappahannock, and at the beginning of the road the prison, and beyond the prison the whole of his past life.

"Did you serve a term in prison before you came here?"

"Yes."

"Were you tried and convicted in New York?"

"Yes."

"Were you guilty?"

Looking over the head of the little man, Ordway's gaze travelled slowly across the upturned faces upon the floor of the house. Hardly a man passed under his look whom he had not assisted once at least in the hour of his need. "I saved that one from drink," he thought almost joyfully, "that one from beggary—I stood side by side with that other in the hour of his shame——"

"Were you guilty?" repeated the high nasal voice in his ear.

His gaze came quickly back, and as it passed over the head of Baxter, he was conscious again of a throb of pity.

"Yes," he answered for the last time. Then, while the silence lasted, he turned from the platform and went out of the hall into the night.

CHAPTER XI
Between Man And Woman

HE walked rapidly to the end of the street, and then slackened his pace almost unconsciously as he turned into the country road. The night had closed in a thick black curtain over the landscape, and the windows of the Negroes' cabins burned like little still red flames along the horizon. Straight ahead the road was visible as a pale, curving streak across the darkness.

A farmer, carrying a lantern, came down the path leading from the fields, and hearing Ordway's footsteps in the road, flashed the light suddenly into his face. Upon recognition there followed a cheerful "good-night!" and the offer of the use of the lantern to Cedar Hill. "It's a black night and you'll likely have trouble in keeping straight. I've been to look after a sick cow, but I can feel my way up to the house in two minutes."

"Thank you," returned Ordway, smiling as the light shone full in his face, "but my feet are accustomed to the road."

He passed on, while the farmer turned at the gate by the roadside, to shout cheerfully after him: "Well, good-night—Mayor!"

The gate closed quickly, and the ray of the lantern darted like a pale yellow moth across the grass.

As Ordway went on it seemed to him that the darkness became tangible, enveloping—that he had to fight his way through it presently as through water. The little red flames danced along the horizon until he wondered if they were burning only in his imagination. He felt tired and dazed as if his body had been beaten into insensibility, but the hour through which he had just passed appeared to have left merely a fading impression upon his brain. Not only had he ceased to care, he had ceased to think of it. When he tried now to recall the manager of the cotton mills, it was to remember, with aversion, his angry little eyes, his high nasal voice, and the wart upon the end of his long nose. At the instant these physical details were the only associations which the man's name presented to his thoughts. The rest was something so insignificant that it had escaped his memory. He felt in a vague way that he was sorry for Baxter, yet this very feeling of sympathy bored and annoyed him. It was plainly ridiculous to be sorry for a person as rich, as fat, as well fed as his employer. Wherever he looked the little red flames flickered and waved in the fields, and when he lifted his eyes to the dark sky, he saw them come and go in short, scintillant flashes, like fire struck from an anvil. They were in his brain, he supposed, after all, and so was this tangible darkness, and so, too, was this indescribable delicacy and lightness with which he moved. Everything was in his brain, even his ridiculous pity for Baxter and the angry-eyed little manager with the wart on his long nose. He could see these things distinctly, though he had forgotten everything that had been so clear to him while he stood on the stage of the town hall. His past life and the prison and even the illumination in which he had remembered them so vividly were obscured now as if they, too, had been received into the tangible darkness.

From the road behind him the sound of footsteps reached him suddenly, and he quickened his pace with an impulse, rather than a determination of flight. But the faster he walked the faster came the even beat of the footsteps, now rising, now falling with a rhythmic regularity in the dust of the road. Once he glanced back, but he could see nothing because of the encompassing blackness, and in the instant of his delay it seemed to him that the pursuit gained steadily upon him, still moving with the regular muffled beat of the footsteps in the thick dust. A horror of recognition had come over him, and as he walked on breathlessly, now almost running, it occurred to him, like an inspiration, that he might drop aside into the fields and so let his pursuer pass on ahead. The next instant he realised that the darkness could not conceal the abrupt pause of his flight—that as those approaching footsteps fell on his ears, so must the sound of his fall on the ears of the man behind him. Then a voice called his name, and he stopped short, and stood, trembling from head to foot, by the side of the road.

"Smith!" cried the voice, "if it's you, Smith, for God's sake stop a minute!"

"Yes, it's I," he answered, waiting, and a moment afterward the hand of Banks reached out of the night and clasped his arm.

"Hold on," said Banks, breathing hard, "I'm all blown."

His laboured breath came with a struggling violence that died gradually away, but while it lasted the strain of the meeting, the awkwardness of the emotional crisis, seemed suddenly put off—suspended. Now in the silence the tension became so great that, drawing slightly away from the detaining hold, Ordway was about to resume his walk. At his first movement, however, Banks clung the more firmly to his arm. "Oh, damn it, Smith!" he burst out, and with the exclamation Ordway felt that the touch of flesh and blood had reached to the terrible loneliness in which he stood. In a single oath Banks had uttered the unutterable spirit of prayer.

"You followed me?" asked Ordway quietly, while the illusions of the flight, the physical delicacy and lightness, the tangible darkness, the little red flames in the fields, departed from him. With the first hand that was laid on his own, his nature swung back into balance, and he felt that he possessed at the moment a sanity that was almost sublime.

"As soon as I could get out I came. There was such a crush," said Banks, "I thought I'd catch up with you at once, but it was so black I couldn't see my hand before me. In a little while I heard footsteps, so I kept straight on."

"I wish you hadn't, Banks."

"But I had to." His usually cheerful voice sounded hoarse and throaty. "I ain't much of a chap at words, Smith, you know that, but I want just to say that you're the best friend I ever had, and I haven't forgot it—I haven't forgot it," he repeated, and blew his nose. "Nothing that that darn fool of a manager said to-night can come between you and me," he went on laboriously after a minute. "If you ever want my help, by thunder, I'll go to hell and back again for you without a word."

Stretching out his free hand Ordway laid it upon his friend's shoulder.

"You're a first-rate chap, Banks," he said cheerfully, at which a loud sob burst from Banks, who sought to disguise it the instant afterward in a violent cough.

"You're a first-rate chap," repeated Ordway gently, "and I'm glad, in spite of what I said, that you came after me just now. I'm going away to-morrow, you know, and it's probable that I shan't see you again."

"But won't you stay on in Tappahannock? In two weeks all this will blow over and things will be just what they were before."

Ordway shook his head, a movement which Banks felt, though he did not see it.

"No, I'll go away, it's best," he answered, and though his voice had dropped to a dull level there was still a cheerful sound to it, "I'll go away and begin again in a new place."

"Then I'll go, too," said Banks.

"What! and leave Milly? No, you won't come. Banks, you'll stay here."

"But I'll see you sometimes, shan't I?"

"Perhaps?—that's likely, isn't it?"

"Yes, that's likely," repeated Banks, and fell silent from sheer weight of sorrow. "At least you'll let me go with you to the station?" he said at last, after a long pause in which he had been visited by one of those acute flashes of sympathy which are to the heart what intuition is to the intellect.

"Why, of course," responded Ordway, more touched by the simple request than he had been even by the greater loyalty. "You may do that, Banks, and I'll thank you for it. And now go back to Tappahannock," he added, "I must take the midday train and there are a few preparations I've still to make."

"But where will you go?" demanded Banks, swinging round again after he had turned from him.

"Where?" repeated Ordway blankly, and he added indifferently, "I hadn't thought."

"The midday train goes west," said Banks.

"Then, I'll go west. It doesn't matter."

Banks had already started off, when turning back suddenly, he caught Ordway's hand and wrung it in a grip that hurt. Then without speaking again, he hurried breathlessly in the direction from which he had come.

A few steps beyond the cross-roads Ordway saw through the heavy foliage the light in the dining-room at Cedar Hill. Then as he entered the avenue, he lost sight of it again, until he had rounded the curve that swept up to the front porch. At his knock Emily opened the door, with a lamp held in her hand, and he saw her face, surrounded by dim waves of hair, shining pale and transparent in the glimmering circle of light. As he followed her into the dining-room, he realised that after the family had gone upstairs to bed, she had sat at her sewing under the lamp and waited for his knock. At the knowledge a sense of comfort, of homeliness came over him, and he felt all at once that his misery was not so great as he had believed it to be a moment ago.

"May I get you something?" she asked, placing the lamp upon the table and lowering the wick that the flame might not shine on his pallid and haggard face.

He shook his head; then as she turned from him toward the hearth, he followed her and stood looking down at the smouldering remains of a wood fire. Her work-basket and a pile of white ruffles which she had been hemming were on the table, but moved by a feeling of their utter triviality in the midst of a tragedy she vaguely understood, she swept them hurriedly into a chair, and came over to lay her hand upon his arm.

"What can I do? Oh, what can I do?" she asked. Taking her hand from his sleeve, he held it for an instant in his grasp, as if the pressure of her throbbing palm against his revived some living current under the outer deadness that enveloped him.

"I am going away from Tappahannock to-morrow, Emily," he said.

"To-morrow?" she repeated, and laid her free hand upon his shoulder with a soothing, motherly gesture—a gesture which changed their spiritual relations to those of a woman and a child.

"A man asked me three questions to-night," he went on quietly, yet in a voice which seemed to feel a pang in every word it uttered. "He asked me if my name was Daniel Smith, and I answered—no."

As he hesitated, she lifted her face and smiled at him, with a smile which he knew to be the one expression of love, of comprehension, that she could offer. It was a smile which a mother might have bent upon a child that was about to pass under the surgeon's knife, and it differed from tears only in that it offered courage and not weakness.

"He asked me if I had been in prison before I came to Tappahannock—and I answered—yes."

His voice broke, rather than ceased, and lifting his gaze from her hands he looked straight into her wide-open eyes. The smile which she had turned to him a moment before was still on her lips, frozen there in the cold pallor of her face. Her eyes were the only things about her which seemed alive, and they appeared to him now not as eyes but as thoughts made visible. Bending her head quickly she kissed the hand which enclosed her own.

"I still believe," she said, and looked into his face.

"But it is true," he replied slowly.

"But it is not the whole truth," she answered, "and for that reason it is half a lie."

"Yes, it is not the whole truth," he repeated, in his effort to catch something of her bright courage.

"Why should they judge you by that and by nothing else?" she demanded with passion. "If that was true, is not your life in Tappahannock true also?"

"To you—to you," he answered, "but to-morrow everything will be forgotten about me except the fact that because I had been in prison, I have lived a lie."

"You are wrong—oh, believe me, you are wrong," she said softly, while her tears broke forth and streamed down her white face.

"No," he returned patiently, as if weighing her words in his thoughts, "I am right, and my life here is wasted now from the day I came. All that I do from this moment will be useless. I must go away."

"But where?" she questioned passionately, as Banks had questioned before her.

"Where?" he echoed, "I don't know—anywhere. The midday train goes west."

"And what will you do in the new place?" she asked through her tears.

He shook his head as if the question hardly concerned him.

"I shall begin again," he answered indifferently at last.

She was turning hopelessly from him, when her eyes fell upon a slip of yellow paper which Beverly had placed under a vase on the mantel, and drawing it out, she glanced at the address before giving it into Ordway's hands.

"This must have come for you in the afternoon," she said, "I did not see it."

Taking the telegram from her, he opened it slowly, and read the words twice over.

"Your father died last night. Will you come home?

"Richard Ordway."