stern town
they'd let me jolly well alone. I'm going to like it immensely, I know,
and it's really due to you."

She found words difficult at the moment. His face and voice dazzled her
like an open door towards sunshine, and after a moment's pause she
looked round the room, saying: "It's going to be fine."

"I want it comfy, so that you and the Captain will feel like coming down
often. We have a great deal to talk over before I shall really have a
full understanding of your affairs. I'm going to bone into my books
hard," he added, boyishly. "To tell the truth, I've taken life pretty
easy. You see, my father left me a regular income, big enough to support
me while I was studying law, but not enough to marry on." She couldn't
have told why, but this subject troubled her and confused her. She
turned away again as he continued: "Alice has a little, not much, in her
own right, and so it is really up to me to settle down and get to work.
Please don't think you are taking the time of a rich and busy man like
Crego. I am very grateful to you. It will enable us to plan a home here
in the West."

Again that keen pang went through her heart, and he, looking towards
Alice, so worn and drooping, was touched with dismay, almost fear.

She was talking to the Captain, but was furtively watching Bertie and
Ben. "How erect and radiant and happy they are," she thought, and a
doubt of the girl came into her mind. "She is so untrained and so
young!" And in this mental exclamation she put her first fear that Ben
might find his position as legal adviser complicated by the admiration
of the Captain's wife.

Something weirdly intuitive had come to Alice Heath in these later
years. As her health declined and her flesh purified, she had come to
possess uncanny powers of vision, and at times seemed to read the very
innermost thoughts of those about her. The loss of her beauty, which had
been exquisite as that of a rose, had made her morbid--which she knew
and struggled against. She forecast the future, and this is disquieting
to any one. "Here at this moment," she often said to herself, "my world
is flooded with sunshine--a static world in appearance. But how will it
be ten years from now? The clock ticks, the sun passes, the universal
sway of death extends." With the same acuteness with which she read
other minds she read her own; but knowing that such imaginings were
unnatural and distressing, she fought against them; yet they came in
spit