rlier that same night, and scanned his own face.

All trace of resentment left his eyes as he realized the ghastly
pallor of those features--all the ragged horror of that oozing welt
which he had only half seen in that first moment when he was clinging
to consciousness with clenched teeth. It was not nice to look at, and
the light that replaced that sudden flare of bitterness was so new
that he did not even recognize it himself at first.

It was a clearer, steadier, surer thing than he had ever known them
to reflect before; all hint of lost-dog sophistication was gone; even
the smile that touched his thin, pain-straightened lips was
different somehow. It was just as whimsical as before, and just as
half-mirthless--gentle as it always had been whenever he thought at
all of her--but there was no wistful hunger left in it, and little
of boyishness, and nothing of lurking self-doubt.

"Why, she couldn't have known," he went on then, still murmuring
aloud. "She couldn't have been expected to believe anything else.
I--I'm not much to look at--just now."

He even forgot that he had tried to follow her--forgot that her cloak
had thrown him sprawling in the doorway.

"I ought to have told her," he condemned himself. "I shouldn't have
let her go--not like that."

In the fullness of this new certainty of self that was setting his
pulses hammering, he even turned toward the sleeping town, thickly
blanketed by the shadows in the valley, in a sudden boyish burst of
generosity.

"Maybe they didn't mean to lie, either," he mused thoughtfully. "Maybe
they haven't really meant to lie--all this time. They could have been
mistaken, just as she was tonight--they certainly could have been
that."

He found and filled a basin with cold water and washed out the cut
until the bleeding had stopped entirely. And then, with the paper
which that afternoon's mail had brought--the sheet with the astounding
news of Jed The Red, which Old Jerry prophesied would put Boltonwood
in black letters on the map of publicity--spread out on the table
before him, he sat until daybreak poring over it with eyes that were
filmed with preoccupation one moment and keenly strained the next to
make out the close-set type.

Not long before dawn he reached inside his coat and brought out a bit
of burnished white card and set it up in front of him against the
lamp. There was much in the plump, black capitals and knobby script of
Judge Maynard's invitation which