Then there came that lightning-like change of mood which always left
him breathless in his inability to follow it. The mirth went out of
her eyes--her lips drooped and began to work strangely as she knelt
and gazed up at him.

"I bought his mortgage," she told him slowly. "I bought it from Judge
Maynard a week ago with part of the money he gave me for our place
there below his. He was very generous. Somehow I feel that he paid
me--much more than it was worth. He's always wanted it and--and
I--there wasn't any need for me to stay there any more, was there?"

Old Jerry had never seen a face so terribly earnest before--so
hungrily wistful--but it was the light that glowed in that kneeling
girl's eyes that held him dumb. It left him completely incapable of
coherent thought, yet mechanically his mind leaped back to that night,
two weeks before, when Young Denny had stumbled and gone floundering
to his knees before her, there on that very threshold. The boy's own
words had painted that picture for him too vividly for him to forget.
And he knew, without reasoning it out, just from the world of pain
there in her eyes, that she, too, at that moment was thinking of that
limp figure--of the great red gash across its chin.

"I didn't help him," she went on, and now her voice was little more
than a whisper. "I went and left him here alone--and hurt--when I
should have stayed, that night when he went away. And so I bought
it--I bought it because I thought some day he might come back--and
need me even more. I thought if he did come--he'd feel as though he
had just--come back home! And--and just to be here waiting, I
thought, too, might somehow help me to have faith that he would come,
some day--safe!"

The old man felt the fiercely tense little arms go slack then. Her
head went forward and lay heavy, pillowed in her hands upon his knees.
But he sat there for a full minute, staring down at the thick,
shimmering mass of her hair, swallowing an unaccountable lump that
bothered his breathing preparatory to telling her all that he had kept
waiting for just that opportunity, before he realized that she was
crying. And for an equally long period he cast desperately about for
the right thing to say. It came to him finally--a veritable
inspiration.

"Why, you don't want to cry," he told her slowly. "They--they ain't
nothing to worry about now! For if that's the case--if you've gone to
work and bought it, why, I ain't got no more jurisd