as all Vandine replied.

All the long forenoon, amid the wild, or menacing, or warning, or
complaining crescendos and diminuendos of the unresting saws, the man's
brain seethed with plans of vengeance. After all these years of waiting
he would be satisfied with no common retribution. To merely kill the
betrayer would be insufficient. He would wring his soul and quench his
manhood with some strange unheard-of horror, ere dealing the final
stroke that should rid earth of his presence. Scheme after scheme burned
through his mind, and at times his gaunt face would crease itself in a
dreadful smile as he pulled the lever that drove his blade through the
deals. Finding no plan altogether to his taste, however, he resolved to
postpone his revenge till night, at least, that he might have the more
time to think it over, and to indulge the luxury of anticipation with
realization so easily within his grasp.

At noon Vandine, muttering to himself, climbed the steep path to the
little cottage on the hillside. He ate his dinner in silence, with
apparently no perception of what was being set before him. His daughter
dared not break in upon this preoccupation. Even his idolized Stevie
could win from him no notice, save a smile of grim triumph that
frightened the child. Just as he was leaving the cottage to return to
the mill, he saw Sarah start back from the window and sit down suddenly,
grasping at her bosom, and blanching to the lips as if she had seen a
ghost. Glancing downward to the black road, deep with rotted sawdust, he
saw MacPherson passing.

"Who is it?" he asked the girl.

"It's Sandy," she murmured, flushing scarlet and averting her face.

Her father turned away without a word and started down the hill.
Presently the girl remembered that there was something terrifying in the
expression of his face as he asked the curt question. With a sudden
vague fear rising in her breast, she ran to the cottage door.

"Father!" she cried, "father!" But Vandine paid no heed to her calls,
and after a pause she turned back into the room to answer Stevie's
demand for a cup of milk.

Along about the middle of the afternoon, while Sandy MacPherson was
still carting sawdust, and Vandine tending his circular amid the
bewildering din, Stevie and some other children came down to play around
the mill.

The favorite amusement with these embryo mill-hands, stream-drivers, and
lumbermen, was to get on the planks as they emerged from the upper