With a shrill whistle of recognition, Jack Cody ran down the hill to meet Split toiling up.

The air is like ethereal champagne in Virginia City, and on a late summer's evening, after the sun's honeyed freshness has been strained through miles of it, it has a quality that makes playing outdoors intoxicating.

Split, though, had not been playing. There was business on hand and she had been downtown to buy eggs for the picnic, with the usual result. She had never yet succeeded in bringing home an unbroken dozen, nor did she ever hope to; but she was really out of temper at the extraordinary dampness of the paper bag, to which her two hands adhered stickily. She walked slowly upward, holding the eggs far in front of her like a votive offering to the culinary gods, unconscious of the betraying yellow streaks that beaded her blue gingham apron.

"Where you been, Split?" asked Cody, by way of an easy opening.

"Down to the grocery. Mrs. Pemberton's not laying decently these days."

"Mrs. Pemberton!"

"Sissy's gray hen, you know. Sissy called her that 's got only one chicken, and bosses him for all the world like Crosby."

Cody nodded. "What time you going to start in the morning? Six?"

"Uh-huh." Split dared not lift her eyes from the sticky trail that exuded from her.

"Sure?" the boy demanded.

"Sure—if only father don't keep us so long to-night that we can't get ready. We've got to be martyred to-night," she added gloomily.

Cody looked his resentment and sympathy. Delicacy and the fear of betraying soed families—forbade his inquiring precisely what the process was. To him "martyring" meant some queer rite whose main and malicious purpose it was to keep Split indoors of an evening when the high mountain twilight was going to be long, long; and when the moon that followed it would be so brilliant that one might read by its light—if he weren't too wise, and too fond of hide-and-seek—out in the silver-flooded streets made vocal by childish cries.

"But it can't last the whole evening?" he asked appealingly, as she prepared to mount the steps, always accompanied by the silent yellow witness of her passing.

She shook her head hopelessly, sniffing in a manner that showed plainly how little reliance she placed upon the generosity and judgment of adults. And Cody walked away, haunted by the tormenting vision of Split flying before him through the moonlit night: the only girl in town who had any originality about choosing hiding-places, or who could make a race worth while.

The family was assembled when Split reached the library and sat down, rebelliously sullen, beside Sissy. That young woman, though, wore an expression of purified patience, a submissive willingness to kiss the rod, that was eminently appropriate, however infuriating to the junior Madigans. But Sissy had known that it was coming. She could have foretold the martyrdom; all the signs of yesterday prophesied it, and she was reconciled.

It followed invariably that after the rare occasions when the pitiful curtain of his egotism had been blown aside by some chance breeze of destiny, and Francis Madigan had stood for a moment face to face with himself and his shirked responsibilities, he made the spasmodic effort to fulfil his paternal obligations, which the Madigans had learned to call their "martyring." He took from his library the book which had been most to him, which he had read all his life: for inspiration when he had been young and hopeful, for philosophy now that he was old and a failure. He was sincere in offering to his children the fruit of a great mind with comments by one that was sympathetic, able if not deep, and genuinely eager, for the moment, to share its enthusiasm.

But the sight of all this helpless though secretly critical womanhood disposed attentively about him invariably, through association of ideas, brought to his mind every similar and abortive attempt he had made in this direction. When he opened the book to read aloud to them, he was always irritated, with that deep-seated irascibility which has its foundation in self-discontent, however externals may influence or add to it.

Whatever Francis Madigan might have been, he was never intended for a pedagogue. His impatience of stupidity, his irritation at the slow, stumbling steps of immaturity, not to speak of his lack of judgment in his selection and his determination to persevere in reading aloud from the book of his choice, if he had to ram undigested wisdom whole into the mental stomachs of his offspring—all this would have deterred a less obstinate man. But Madigan, who had become a bully through weakness (forced to domineer unsuccessfully in his home by the conquering softness of his sister's disposition), had the bully's despairing consciousness of being in the wrong at the very moment of superficial victory; of being powerless in the very act of imposing himself upon his poor little women-folk; of recognizing the fact that, although he might lead them to the fountain of knowledge, he was unable to make them drink; and yet not daring to hesitate in his bullying, for fear that he might do nothing at all if he did not do this.

Now that his conscience was quickened, Madigan insisted to himself that the culture of his daughters' minds must be attended to. So he read aloud from "The Martyrdom of Man"; and enjoyed the sound of his voice—the irresistible accents of the cultured Irishman—a pleasure which the world shared with him; but not a martyred world of small women, over whose heads the long-sounding, musical periods of the poet-historian rolled, dropping only an occasional light shower of intelligence upon the untilled minds below.

"We will begin where we left off the last time," Madigan said harshly. He remembered how long it had been since "last time," and how much his audience had had time to forget. "Where was that? Were any of you interested enough to remember?"

Miss Madigan looked up from her work, like an amiable but very silly hen who pretends to make a mental effort, yet, unfortunately, has nothing to make that effort with. Kate, with the consciousness that she was really the only one of Madigan's children capable of following the line of the historian's thought, flushed guiltily. Irene sat like a prisoner, looking out into the balmy evening. She could hear cries of "Free home! Free home!" from down yonder in the paradise of the streets, in Crosby Pemberton's voice. Even Crosby, whose unnatural mother was the only lady of Split's acquaintance who was prejudiced against playing in the streets—even Crosby was out. While she—

"It was the fall of Carthage, wasn't it, father?" asked Sissy, sweetly.

If a glance from Split could have slain, Sissy had been dead. It was not the Madigan policy to encourage Francis Madigan in his belief that the seeds he sought to sow fell on fertile soil. If they had to be martyred in one sense, they declined to be in another. Besides, they knew and detested Sissy's hypocritical desire to "show off."

"It was, indeed, Cecilia," said Madigan, with a pathetic softening of his whole being. "'Tis a fine, stirring, terrible picture the historian gives us of the doomed city. Ahem!... 'And then, as if the birds of the air had carried the news, it became known all over northern Africa that Carthage was about to fall. And then, from the dark and dismal corners of the land, from the wasted frontiers of the desert, from the snowy lairs and caverns of the Atlas, there came creeping and crawling to the coast the most abject of the human race—black, naked, withered beings, their bodies covered with red paint, their hair cut in strange fashions, their language composed of muttering and whistling sounds. By day they prowled around the camp, and fought with the dogs for the offal and the bones. If they found a skin, they roasted it on ashes, and danced around it in glee, wriggling their bodies and uttering abominable cries. When the feast was over, they cowered together on their hams, and fixed their gloating eyes upon the city, and expanded their blubber-lips and showed their white fangs. At last-'"

A piercing scream came from Frances.

"Thousand devils!" Madigan burst forth, enraged at the interruption.

It was only that Bep and Fom, in the midst of a finger conversation carried on politely with a deaf-and-dumb alphabet, had had their attention attracted by the ghastly word-picture made so vivid by their father's voice. So, wearying of the innocuous desuetude of things, it occurred to them to present for Frank's entertainment a bodily representation of what the words meant to their minds. Safe in the obscurity of the table-cloth's circular shadow, down on the floor they wriggled, they prowled, they cowered and gloated and expanded their blubber-lips and showed their fangs. If they did not utter abominable cries, it was only because that particular detail was not needed to send the smallest Madigan into hysterics.

"Leave the room!" cried Madigan. "Leave the room, you ox!" looking wrathfully, but generally, down at the disturbance.

And three small Madigans, feeling that they had paid a small price for freedom, crept and crawled to the door—the most abject of the Madigan race till they were fairly outside, when they became the most jubilant.

"'At last,'" went on Madigan, a lingering growl of resentment in his voice, "'the day came. The harbor walls were carried by assault and the Roman soldiers passed into—'"

"Father," interrupted Sissy, with the exasperating air of one who knows how soothing she is (like many a talented person, she was irretrievably ruined by her first success and she felt very intelligent)—"father, in what part of Rome was Carthage?"

Behind her father's back Split mouthed a threat of vengeance and shook her fist at the interested Sissy for wilfully prolonging the session. But at Madigan's snort of disgust, the Indian profile of Split, below its bushy crown of red, shone out malevolently. She did not know what Sissy had done; she knew only that she had done something.

Sissy met her glance, and returned it with dignity. "I didn't mean that, father, you know," she said priggishly. "I meant, of course, in what part of Carthage was Rome."

"Oh, you did!" Madigan's smile was not pleasant.

"Ye-es," said Sissy, uncertainly.

"Well," said Madigan, explosively, "Rome was in the same part of Carthage as Carthage was of Rome."

His jaw was set now, and his glowing dark eyes beneath their white shaggy brows as he sought his place in the book were not encouraging. But the enigmatic character of his response was not enough for Sissy, dazed, yet greedy for glory. She glanced from Split, in whose ear Kate was whispering something that seemed vastly to delight her, to her father, who had begun to read again.

"I don't remember, father, please," she said as he paused a moment to clear his throat. "What part was that?"

A sputtering giggle broke from Split. It was unlucky, for it turned Madigan's wrath upon her.

"Outside!" he commanded, pointing to the door. "Outside, you ox!..."

"'Six days passed thus,'" the reading began again. (In almost the moment the door had closed behind her, Split could be heard flying down the outside steps two at a time. That he was sorely tried, Madigan's voice showed plainly, and his shrunken audience looked apprehensively at one another). "'Six days passed thus and only the citadel was left. It was a steep rock in the middle of the town; a temple of the god of healing crowned the summit.' The god of healing, Cecilia," he put in, with a contempt that mantled the perfectionist's check with a resentful red, "means that particular deity—"

A soft little snore came from Miss Madigan. Her head had fallen to one side, and the lamp-light shone on her soft, pretty, high-colored face, placid in its repose as a baby's.

In the moment that Madigan paused and looked at her, Sissy's hand sought Kate's in terror. But the reader controlled himself with an effort, remembering possibly that, after all, it was not his sister but his daughters he was educating.

"'The rock was covered with people,'" he went on, skipping the explanation he had intended giving to Sissy. And he read on for some minutes without interruption, becoming more and more interested himself in the vivid picture as it unrolled, and half declaiming it in his enthusiasm, with a verve that accounted for Sissy's successful rendition of "The Polish Boy" at school entertainments. "'The trumpets sounded,'" he sang out. "'The soldiers, clashing their bucklers with their swords and uttering the war-cry Alala! Alala! advanced in—'"

"Mercy me!" exclaimed Miss Madigan, waked by his realistic shout, and blinking her bright little eyes to accustom them to the light.

"Anne," said Madigan, tensely, "if you are not interested, you—are not obliged to listen, of course. But it would be more—civil to withdraw if—"

"Not interested?" she repeated, with gentle surprise, as she took up her crocheting again. "Why, it's very interesting—most interesting; don't you find it so, Kate?"

"'A man dressed in purple rushed out of the temple with an olive-branch in his hand,'" Madigan began again, all the ardor gone from his voice. "'This was Hasdrubal, the commander-in-chief, and the Robespierre of the Reign of Terror. His—'"

"Missy Kate—want chocolate—picnic—" Wong stood open-mouthed in the doorway. Consciousness of having interrupted the master, as well as amazement at beholding him out of his own room after dinner, was too much for him.

"What do you want, Wong?" demanded Madigan, harshly.

"Notting—oh, notting," murmured Wong, deprecatingly. "One picnic, sabe, t'-malla morning."

"Irene—I mean Cecilia—Thousand devils!—Kate," stormed Madigan, in his rage forgetting his daughter's precise appellation, "go out into the kitchen and give your orders. If you had the least grain of common sense you'd know that the first duty of a housekeeper is to have some system about her work; to do things at the right time and not to interrupt the evening's entertainment." He gulped a bit at this, though Kate's dropped lids quickly hid the ironical gleam in her eye. "Well, why don't you go—and stay? You might as well, or you'll forget something else and interrupt us again."

A desire to make herself look very numerous, intelligent, and appreciative possessed Sissy as the door closed on her big sister. She was in the familiar frame of mind in which she disapproved of her sisters, yet she was terrified lest, if she gave him time, her father might draw the same inference that she had.

"Perhaps you'll let me read aloud for a while, father. Mr. Garvan often has me read things to the class," she suggested quickly, when she saw he was about to close the book.

Madigan hesitated. A succession of infuriating trifles had beat upon his temper till it was worn thin. But Sissy's outstretched hand conquered merely by suggestion. He put the book before her, pointed to the place, got to his feet, and began pacing to and fro.

"'Carthage burned seventeen days before it was entirely consumed,'" read Sissy. "'Then the plow was passed over the soil to put an end in legal form to the existence of the city. House might never be built, corn might never be sown, upon the ground where it had stood.'"

She read well, did Sissy, as she did most things. Little by little Madigan's sharp, quick steps became less and less the bodily expression of exasperated nerves, and tuned themselves to the meter of that pretty, childish voice, intelligently giving utterance to the thoughtful philosophy that had always soothed him. It lost some of its familiarity and gained a new charm, coming from that small, round mouth which had an almost faultless instinct for pronunciation. A feeble germ of fatherly pride began to sprout beneath the soil upon which the child's intelligent reading fell like a warm, spring rain.

"One moment, Cecilia." Madigan stopped in his walk, lifting an apologetic hand to excuse the interruption. "You read just now of 'the Britons of Cornwall gathering on high places and straining their eyes toward the west; the ships which had brought them beads and purple cloth would come again no more.' Now, to what does that refer?"

Sissy's hands flew to her breast; and before she had time to conceal, to pretend, to affect, he had seen the blank expression of her face. You see, she had been merely reading; not thinking. The sound of her own voice had drowned the sense. To read intelligently a thing the comprehension of which was far over her head was the utmost this eleven-year-old could do. She had not the vaguest idea what she had been reading. It was all a blank!

Madigan stood petrified; and the last little martyred ox, stuffing her apron into her mouth, that she might not weep aloud, hurried from the room.

A moment longer Madigan stood. Then he looked at Miss Madigan. That lady's placid face had not changed a particle. She sat crocheting what she called a fascinator, her white bone needle moving harmoniously in and out of the blue wool. Had she heard a word that had been read? Her brother knew better than to ask. Did it make the least difference to her whether he read from "The Martyrdom of Man" or not?

Madigan shut the book with a bang. The "martyring," boomerang that it had proved, was over.

The world seems new-born every summer morning in Virginia City. This little mining-town, dry, sterile, and unlovely, and built at an absurd angle up the mountain, is the poor relation of her fortunate cousins of the high Alps; yet shares with them their birthright—an open, boundless breadth of view, an endless depth of unpolluted, sparkling air, the fresh, shining virginity of the new-created.

It was the sense of a nature-miracle, and the desire to penetrate still farther and higher into the crystalline sky that crowned it, which sent the Madigans every summer toiling up Mount Davidson. They did not know it, but yearly the Wanderlust seized them, and as all things in Virginia point one way, they followed that suggestion—upward.

They were spared the usual struggle with Frances (who, after being coaxed, bribed, threatened, and bullied, had at last annually to be run away from), for the reason that Frank had not slept well after the martyring, and was still dreaming of creeping, crawling things with blubber-lips and gloating eyes when, in the pellucid dawn, Jack Cody found the Madigans waiting, in clean calicoes, perched on their bottommost step.

The sun was barely over the top of Sugar Loaf, and the town, scantily shrubberied (for water costs as many dollars in Virginia as there are weeks in the year), lay sleeping in soft chill shadow below them, looking oddly picturesque and strange in the unfamiliar light.

"Say," said Cody, "I think I see that Pemberton kid coming up Taylor. Is he coming along?"

"No," said Sissy, promptly.

"Yes," said Split, firmly.

"Well, I didn't ask him," from Sissy, with a haughty air of saying the last word. The Madigans were quite accustomed to being social arbiters in their own small world.

"Well, I did," remarked Split, easily.

A pugnacious red overshot Sissy's face. Crosby was her property, to browbeat and maltreat as seemed best to her. She felt that Irene's interference in a matter that was purely personal was unwarranted as it was intolerable.

"He always has such good cream-tarts," explained Split.

"Well, he can have 'em and keep 'em," declared Sissy, savagely, turning her back as Crosby yodeled a greeting and waved his hat gaily to her.

Cody grinned. "I think that kid better stay at home. It won't be much picnic for him, will it, Sissy?"

Sissy sniffed. "He's Split's company," she said loftily. "She'll make things pleasant for him."

But Crosby, glad to be among the enticing Madigans at any price, and innocently joying in the picnic spirit that possessed him, came whooping to his fate.

"Say," he said eagerly, putting down his basket with the air of one who has a good story to tell, "do you know, I almost got caught this morning. Ma said I wasn't to go, but I bet I wouldn't stay at home. So I told Delia to put up my lunch last night, and to put in a lot of those cream-tarts you like, Sissy—you used to like, Sissy...."

But Sissy, actuated by a delicate desire not to interfere in the slightest with Split's plans for the entertainment of her guest, was deep in conversation with Jack Cody. Crosby's jaw fell. He saw her give her round tin lunch-bucket—the one he had so often carried to school for her—to Cody, to sling with his own upon a leather strap. And as he watched her start up the ravine carrying one end of the strap, and the washerwoman's boy the other, he wondered passionately within himself at the faithlessness and ingratitude of women.

Wasn't it enough to have a reckoning with Madam Pemberton at the end of his day, without having that precious time utterly spoiled? He felt like turning back. Sissy knew well that there could be no picnic for him within the pale of her displeasure. The mountain air might be never so sweet with the wild sage perfuming it; the sun striping the shadowy town below with bloody bands might be never so promising; the mountain's peak, soft and deceitfully near, might be never so tempting—with Sissy chattering gaily in advance, ostentatiously ignorant of his very existence, the glory was cut out of Crosby's morn. It seemed, too, to him that he had never been so fond of her. His mother's disapproval of this Madigan since a certain episode (to avenge which cruel Sissy's thirst could never be slaked) had put the last touch to his devotion. That matron's pleasure in their intercourse hitherto had been the one drawback to his delight in it. In his eyes, his inamorata walked now with the crown of the forbidden upon her haughty little head; and that Crosby was more of a natural boy than his effeminate tastes indicated is proven by the fact that he loved Sissy far more for this than for being "the good one" his mother had once thought and proclaimed her.

At the sluice-box which circles Mount Davidson, bringing the purest of water from a mountain lake, the party halted and was joined by other brave mountaineers, big and little; the latter in calico skirts, and shirts and knickerbockers. Bombey Forrest was the only one who came under neither of these heads. She was a slender slip of a girl whose mother, to the scandal of conventional folk, believed that for the first decade or so of child-life the boy's costume is fitter than the girl's. So Bombey wore a knickerbockered sailor-suit with a broad collar and white braid; wore it with a bit of a conscious air, yet with that grace which long use and habit lend; with piquancy, too, for she was the least masculine of girls in mind and manner, and her delicate face with its golden curls bloomed like a flower on a strange stalk, above the assertive masculinity of her attire.

It was to Bombey that Crosby Pemberton turned for solace. (Split had promptly deserted him for Kate, whom she suspected of a contemptible desire to cut loose from the Madigans as children, and join the older members of the party.) He had not had the courage to forgo the picnic, though he knew his mistress well enough to be sure that by the end of the day he would realize that that course would have been the least painful. He carried Bombey's basket, like the little gentleman he was; not in the division-of-labor fashion, from which Cody's and Sissy's jangling buckets extracted a sort of cow-bell music as they ran merrily along, far in advance.

Cody spied the two below when he and Sissy sat down to rest on a huge boulder. Jack never knew how to treat Bombey Forrest, always feeling that the most decent thing to do was not to look at her. Despite his own bitter and recurring experiences (which, one might fancy, would have made him tender to the vicissitudes of sex as warranted by clothing), something in him felt outraged and resentful at the sight of her.

"Look at the girl-boy and the boy-girl!" he sneered. "See how they poke along. They'll never get to the top."

Sissy's shoes were hot and dusty. The strong odor of sage-brush was in her nostrils. Her skirt was torn, and the short-stemmed desert-lilies she held in a moist hand were wilted. But she was happy, for she was outdoing, she was pretending, and she was punishing. The only thing that detracted from her pleasure was to be obliged to concur in Cody's opinion. That roused her perversity. She loved to lead or to oppose—not to agree.

"Let's go on," she said imperiously. "What are you stopping for?"

As the sun climbed higher, the mountain's top got farther and farther away. But Cody, who had scaled not only its summit, but the flagpole that tipped it, knew its habit of piling one small hill up behind the other, as though, like a grotesque Gulliver playing a practical joke, it delighted in fatiguing and disappointing the Liliputians that swarmed up from its base. Crosby and Bombey and the twins, with the Misses Blind-Staggers,—blinder than ever to-day for the glare on their blue goggles,—had yielded long since. They were camping patiently in a ravine far below, where a tiny spring hinted at dining-room conveniences. The rest of the party, with Irene revenging herself upon Kate's disloyalty by sticking like a burr to that young lady (whom, Split thought, Mr. Garvan was treating altogether too much like a young lady), was close on the vanguard's heels. And Sissy and Cody, panting now, but toiling doggedly on, had reached the cool little cup-shaped hollow in the cone where the snow lies.

From here to the top was but a few minutes' run. Cody was all for halting and snow-balling the party as it came up, but Sissy was too exhausted to stop now.

"We'll rest at the top of the hill," she decided impatiently, and hurried him on, both a bit out of temper.

No beauty of winding river and peaceful valley checkered with fields of grain, no low-lying gardens and climbing forests, reward the scaler of the heights behind the Comstock—only the bare little brown town far down, digging tenacious heels into the mountain's side and propped up with spindle-shanked foothold, the great white inverted cones of steam rising from the mines, the naked and scarred majesty of the gray mountains all about, the desert gleaming like a lake in the east, and Washoe Lake gleaming like a desert in the west.

Yet Sissy held her breath. Something in the still purity of the air, the savage grandeur of the mountains, the great arch of liquid blue above her, caught and held her impressionable spirit. She stretched out her hands—a small, petticoated Balboa—to the world she had discovered. "It—it makes you want to scream," she stammered.

"Booh!" It was a yell from Cody, delivered full in her ear. "If you want to scream, darn it, scream!" was his practical advice as he spat out the sunflower-seeds he had been chewing and prepared to climb the pole.

Sissy stood looking at him, the color flooding her face. And as he noted her expression, the boy suddenly remembered that he did not like Split's sister. But his mild memory of distaste was as nothing to the disgust that possessed Sissy. In her ecstasy she had unwittingly lifted a corner of the lid that she kept tight over her emotions. Logically, she hated the unimpressed and profane witness of the phenomenon.

She turned her back on him, refusing even to look at his progress up the high pole. She would not see when, at its top, small as a fly at the point of a pencil, he waved his hat and, ululating brassily, gave vent to the desire to be noisily vocal which had clutched Sissy's throat into silence. At luncheon, she found a spot that was farthest from him; and when he and Split tore noisily down the mountain's side on the way back, she submitted rather to be outdone than to join a party of which he was one.

Crosby Pemberton, bracing himself for the derision he expected from her, was delighted to see her come sliding down alone to the ravine, where the successful ones paused to take up the rest of the party. Her solitary state encouraged him, and he sought her where she sat knocking the sand out of her shoe.

"Sissy," he said softly, holding out a peace-offering, "I saved some cream-puffs for you."

But the ruthless Sissy was not to be so easily placated. "You mean for Split, don't you?" she said, scarcely looking at him, and diligently lacing her shoe. "She asked you to come, you know. I didn't."

With the look of a wounded dove, Crosby turned, and Sissy saw Irene a moment later, her teeth gluttonously closed over one of Delia's biggest puffs, a heart-breaking amount of "filling" gushing over her cheeks and chin.

But to do without for the sake of principle was ever rapture to the purist. Sissy placed the pangs of desire to the credit side of Crosby's account; this was only one thing more she owed her victim. In fact, as the party started on, so engaged was she in inventing and perfecting tortures for him that she followed the procession on its unusual detour without demur. It was only when it was too late that she saw Bullion Ravine ahead of her, and the swaying high trestle over which the flume is carried.

Split's malicious face as that most sure-footed of Madigans touched the first plank made Sissy realize the test to which she was to be put. Her terror of giddy heights was treated as an absurd affectation by the steady-headed Madigans, and as such requiring discipline, which, with truly sisterly foresight, Split had provided. She ran across now with the joy of a thing that feels itself flying. Jack Cody turned a handspring in the very middle; and the sight so nauseated Sissy that she had to stand aside and let those immediately behind her pass first. Yet she dared not remain till the last, for a panicky picture in her mind showed her to herself paralyzed forever on the brink. As she put her foot on the first board, beneath which she could hear the running water chuckling and gurgling as it ran, she swore to herself that she would not look down. And, indeed, she did keep her eyes on Crosby Pemberton's straw hat, as he walked some distance in front of her. But the moment his foot touched the ground on the other side, the light structure, relieved of his weight, changed its rhythmic swaying, which had measured the steady strength of his step. Its rebound, exaggerated by Sissy's tense nerves, seemed sickeningly high; its fall ghastly low. Swung there from mountain to mountain, its slender supports looked frail as a spider's woof, and seemed to tremble with every gasping breath she drew. In spite of herself, her eye caught the silvery glitter of the thread of water far below in the stony bed of the nearly dry creek.

It was all over with Sissy. Trembling with terror, she sat down, clutching the edge of the board beneath her, the world swimming away before her shut eyes, just as it did when one looked too long through a knot-hole at the flowing race in the flume beneath.

Irene's giggle came faintly to her; she was too terrified to resent it. The murmur of voices that called her name, encouragingly, warningly, angrily, was not so loud as the chuckling of the water in the box which seemed to hurry her senses away. She lived through years of agony, in which she found herself wishing that she could only fall and end it. Then she felt the trestle bound beneath her, and she was waked by the touch of Crosby's hand.

"Get up!" he said in a tone of command that reminded her of that grenadier his mother.

She opened her eyes and saw that his face was white, but the glitter of determination in his eyes was so new and curious that it held her attention for the moment necessary to give her strength to obey. He almost pulled her to her feet, and then half dragged, half ran with her across. Yet within ten feet of the end, the trembling of his hand had communicated itself to her whole body. She watched the drops of perspiration fall from his pale face and, fascinated, followed them down with her eyes. Then wrenching her hand from his, she almost fell down again. It seemed to her her head swayed back and forth with such force as might bear her whole body with it, and she squatted down, shivering.

It was a most humiliating finish to an exciting adventure, for when he strove to compel her again to rise, Crosby found that terror is contagious. He himself dared not stand. He squatted down in front of her, and on all fours the two crawled toward the bank. Sissy could have kissed the earth when her hands touched it.

But it took her some time to recover. The sympathetic fussing of the Misses Bryne-Stivers she endured as in a dream. She even permitted Mr. Garvan to take her hand and help her walk for a time. But when they reached the first house and had turned down Taylor Street, she was so thoroughly herself that she contrived to let the rest pass her, and she rested till Crosby came up. She was walking beside him, with a sudden flattering kindness that almost turned his head, when he looked in the direction in which her eyes were fixed, and saw his mother in her phaeton pull up and beckon to him.

He looked shyly at Sissy. He would have given much to be told that this forgiveness was not to be merely temporary, like others that had preceded it whenever Mrs. Pemberton might see and disapprove; that he was no longer to be flouted and scorned when there was nobody but Sissy herself to be glad of it.

"The shadow of the guillotine is over you!" said Sissy, in a bombastic whisper addressed to Mrs. Pemberton—a comforting formula the Madigans had invented to still their envy of those who rode in carriages. But her smiling face, when it turned toward Crosby, had no threat in it.

Relieved, forgiven, reinstated,—for there was a promise without words in his tyrant's good humor,—Crosby laughed out gaily. At that moment he had no more fear for Madam Pemberton than for the invoked Madame Guillotine.

"S' long, Sissy," he cried, waving his basket to her as he went, a young aristocrat, to meet his fate.

That night Sissy said her prayers in a rush. She wanted to give her undivided attention to plans of revenge on Split.