MRS. PORTER drove down the village street between the rows of scattered houses till she arrived at a modest cottage with a white paling fence in front and a few stunted flowers. Here she alighted. There was a hitching-post, with an old horseshoe nailed near the top for a hook, and, throwing the reins over it, she went into the yard. Some one came to a window and parted the curtains. It was Hillhouse. He turned and stepped quickly to the door, a startled expression of inquiry on his face.

“Come in, come in,” he said. “Really, I wasn't looking for anybody to drop in so early in the day; and this is the first time you've ever called, Sister Porter.”

With a cold nod she walked past him into the little white-walled, carpetless hall.

“You've got a parlor, haven't you?” she asked, cautiously looking around.

“Oh yes; excuse me,” he stammered, and he awkwardly opened a door on the right. “Walk in, walk in. I'm awfully rattled this morning. Seeing you so sudden made me—”

“I hope the Marshall family across the street weren't watching as I got out,” she broke in, as she preceded him into the parlor. “People talk so much here, and I wanted to see you privately. Let a woman with a grown daughter go to an unmarried preacher's house and you never hear the last of it.”

She sat down in a rocking-chair and looked about her, he thought, with an expression of subdued excitement. The room was most simply furnished. On the floor lay a rag carpet, with rugs of the same material. A cottage organ stood in one corner, and a round, marble-topped table in the centre of the room held a lamp and a plush-covered album. On the white walls hung family portraits, black-and-white enlarged photographs. The window looking towards the street had a green shade and white, stiffly starched lace curtains..

“Your mother and sister—are they in the house?” Mrs. Porter asked.

“No,” he answered, standing in front of her. “They went over to McGill's as soon as breakfast was finished. You know their little boy got kicked by a mule yesterday.”

“Yes, I heard so, and I'm glad they are not here—though you'd better tell them I came. If you don't, and the Marshalls happen to mention it to them, they might think it strange.”

“You wanted to see me alone, then?” Hillhouse put out his stiff, tentative hand and drew a chair to him and sat down in it.

“Yes, I'm in trouble—great, great trouble,” the old woman said, her steely glance on his face; “and to tell you the truth, I don't see how I'm going to get around it. I couldn't mention it to any one else but you, not even Nathan nor mother. In fact, you ought to know, for it's bound to worry you, too.”

“Oh, Sister Porter, what is it? Don't keep me waiting. I knew you were in some trouble when I saw your face as you came in at the gate. Is it about—”

“Of course it's about Cynthia,” sighed the woman—“about her and Nelson Floyd.”

“He's dead, and she—” Hillhouse began, but Mrs. Porter stopped him.

“No, that isn't it,” she went on. “He's alive. He's back here.”

“Oh, is that so?” Hillhouse leaned forward, his face white, his thin lips quivering.

“Yes, I'll tell you about it,” went on Mrs. Porter. “Of late I've been unable to sleep for thinking of Cynthia and her actions, she's seemed so reckless and despondent, and last night I left my bed and started to creep in and see if she was asleep. I had on soft slippers and made no noise, and had just got to the end of the hall, when her door opened and she went out at the front.”

“Gone? Oh, don't—don't tell me that, Mrs. Porter!”

“No, not that, quite; but wait till I am through,” Mrs. Porter said, her tone hard and crisp. “When I got to the porch I saw her just disappearing in the orchard. And then I heard somebody whistling like a whippoorwill. It was Nelson Floyd. He was standing at the grape-arbor, and the two met there. They went inside and sat down, and then, as there was a thick row of rose-bushes between the house and the arbor, I slipped up behind it. I crouched down low till I was almost flat on the ground. I heard every word that passed between them.”

Hillhouse said nothing. The veins in his forehead stood out full and dark. Drops of perspiration, the dew of mental agony, appeared on his cheeks.

“Don't form hasty judgment,” Mrs. Porter said. “If I ever doubted, or feared my child's weakness on that man's account, I don't now. She's as good and pure as the day she was born. In fact, I don't believe she would have gone out to meet him that way if she hadn't been nearly crazy over the uncertainty as to what had happened to him. I don't blame her; I'd have done it myself if I'd cared as much for a man as she does about him—or thinks she does.”

“You say you heard what passed?” Hillhouse panted.

“Yes, and never since I was born have I heard such stuff as he poured into that poor child's ears. As I listened to his talk, one instant my heart would bleed with sympathy and the next I'd want to grab him by the throat and strangle him. He was all hell and all heaven's angels bound up in one human shape to entrap one frail human being. He went over all his suffering from babyhood up, saying he had had as much put on him as he could stand. He had come back by stealth and didn't want a soul but her to know he was here; he didn't intend ever to face the sneers of these folks and let them throw up his mother's sin to him. He'd been on a long and terrible debauch, but had sobered up and promised to stay that way if she would run away with him to some far-off place where no soul would ever know his history. He had no end of funds, he said; he'd made money on investments outside of Springtown, and he promised to gratify every wish of hers. She was to have the finest and best in the land, and get away from a miserable existence under my roof. Oh, I hate him—poisoning her mind against the mother who nursed her!”

“He wanted her to elope!” gasped Hillhouse—“to elope with a man just off of a long drunk and with a record like that behind him—her, that beautiful, patient child! But what did she say?”

“At first she refused to go, as well as I could make out, and then she told him she would have to think over it. He is to meet her at the same place next Friday night, and if she decides to go between now and then she will be ready.”

“Thank God, we've discovered it ahead of time!” Hillhouse said, fervently, and he got up, and, with his head hanging low and his bony hands clutched behind him over the tails of his long, black coat, he walked back and forth from the window to the door. “I tell you, Sister Porter,” he almost sobbed, “I can't give her up to him. I can't, I tell you. It isn't in me. I'd die rather than have her go off with him.”

“So would I—so would I, fearin' what I now do,” Mrs. Porter said, without looking at him.

“Fearing what you now do?” Hillhouse paused in front of her.

“That's what I said.” The old woman raised her eyes to his. Hillhouse sank down into his chair, nursing a new-born alarm in his lap.

“What do you mean, Sister Porter?” he asked, in a low tone.

“Why, I mean that I never heard any thoroughly rational man on earth talk just as Floyd did last night. I may be away off. I may be wronging him badly, but not once in all his tirade did he say right in so many words that he meant actually to marry her.”

“Great God, the damnable wretch!” Hillhouse sprang again to his feet. Mrs. Porter put out her hand and caught his arm and drew him down to his chair again.

“Don't decide hastily,” she urged him. “I laid awake all night trying to get it clear in my head. He had lots to say about the awful way the world had treated him, and that he felt, having no name, that he was unworthy of anybody as sweet and good as she was, but that if she would go off with him he'd feel that she had sacrificed everything for him and that that would recompense him for all he had lost. He even said that Providence sometimes worked that way, giving people a lot to bear at first, and then lifting them out of it all of a sudden.”

Hillhouse leaned forward till his elbows rested on his knees and he covered his ghastly face with his hands. For a moment he was silent. Mrs. Porter could hear him breathing heavily. Suddenly he looked at her from eyes that were almost bloodshot.

“I understand him,” he declared. “He fell into a drunkard's hell, feeling that he was justified in such a course by his ill-luck, and now he has deliberately persuaded himself that both he and she would be justified in defying social customs—being a law unto themselves as it were. It is just the sort of thing a man of his erratic character would think of, and the damnable temptation is so dazzling that he is trying to make himself believe they have a right to it.”

“Really, that was what I was afraid of,” said Mrs. Porter, with a soft groan. “I heard him tell her that he would never be called by the name of Floyd again. Surely, a man has to have a name of some sort to get legally married, doesn't he?”

“Of course he has,” said Hillhouse. “But, my God, Sister Porter, what are you going to do?”

“That's the trouble,” answered the old woman. “I understand Cynthia well enough to know that she will not be coerced in the matter. She is going to think it all over, and if she decides to go with him no power on earth will stop her. She looks already better satisfied. The only thing I can see is for me to try to stir up her sympathies in some way. She's tender-hearted; she'd hate to be the cause of my suffering. We must work together, and in secret, Brother Hillhouse.

“Work together, but how?” the preacher groaned. “I can't think of a thing to do. If I appealed to her on the score of my love for her she would only balance that off by his, and all she imagines the scoundrel suffers.”

“Oh, his trouble is real enough,” Mrs. Porter declared. “I tell you that in spite of my hatred for him, and even in spite of his cowardly insinuations against me ringing in my ears last night, I felt sorry for him. It would pierce a heart of stone to hear him talk as he did to her. If she resists, she will be a stronger woman than I would have been at her age and under the same circumstances. Pshaw! what would I have cared if I'd loved a man with all my heart and fate had deprived him of a name to give me—what would I have cared for the opinions of a little handful of people pent up here in the mountains when he was asking me to go with him out into the wide world and take my chances along with him? I don't know, Brother Hillhouse, but that I'd have gloried in the opportunity to say I was no better than he was. That's the way most women would look at it; that's the way, I'm afraid, she will look at it.”

The preacher turned upon her, cold fury snapping in his eyes and voice. “You talk that way—you!” he snarled—“and you her mother! You are almost arguing that because his father and mother branded him as they did that he and Cynthia have a right to—to brand their—their own helpless offspring the same way. Sin can't be compromised with.”

“Ah, you are right. I wasn't looking far enough ahead,” Mrs. Porter acknowledged. “No, we must save her. Heaven could not possibly bless such a step as that. I want her to hear somebody talk on that line. Say, Brother Hillhouse, if I can get her to come to church to-morrow, could you not, in a roundabout way, touch on that idea?”

“God knows I am willing to try anything—anything!” the minister said, despondently. “Yes, bring her, if she will come. She seems to listen to me. I'll do my best.”

“Well, I'll bring her,” Mrs. Sorter promised. “Good-morning. I'd better get back. They will wonder what's keeping me.”