own
pockets--every damned one of 'em came to Andrew Bolton for money, and
he gave it to them. He was no hoarding skinflint; not he. Better for
him if he had been. When luck went against him, as it did at last,
these precious villagers turned on him like a pack of wolves. They
killed his wife; stripped his one child of everything--even to the
bed she slept in; and the man himself they buried alive under a
mountain of stone and iron, where he rotted for eighteen years!"

The stranger's eyes were glaring with maniacal fury; he shook a
tremulous yellow finger in the other's face.

"Talk about ruin!" he shouted. "Talk about one man's villainy! This
damnable village deserves to be razed off the face of the earth! ...
But I meant to forgive them. I was willing to call the score even."

A nameless fear had gripped the younger man by the throat.

"Are you--?" he began; but could not speak the words.

"My name," said the stranger, with astonishing composure, in view of
his late fury, "is Andrew Bolton; and the girl you have been praising
and--courting--is my daughter. Now you see what a sentimental fool a
woman can be. Well; I'll have it out with her. I'll live here in
Brookville on equal terms with my neighbors. If there was ever a debt
between us, it's been paid to the uttermost farthing. I've paid it in
flesh and blood and manhood. Is there any money--any property you can
name worth eighteen years of a man's life? And such years-- God! such
years!"

Wesley Elliot stared. At last he understood the girl, and as he
thought of her shrinking aloofness standing guard over her eager
longing for friends--for affection, something hot and wet blurred his
eyes. He was scarcely conscious that the man, who had taken to
himself the name with which he had become hatefully familiar during
his years in Brookville, was still speaking, till a startling
sentence or two aroused him.

"There's no reason under heaven why you should not marry her, if you
like. Convict's daughter? Bah! I snap my fingers in their faces. My
girl shall be happy yet. I swear it! But we'll stop all this sickly
sentimentality about the money. We'll--"

The minister held up a warning hand.

An immense yearning pity for Lydia had taken possession of him; but
for the man who had thus risen from a dishonorable grave to blight
her girlhood he felt not a whit.

"You'd better keep quiet," he said sternly. "You'd far better go away
and leave her to live her life alone.