ve slipped from him like a
gay cloak, revealing the stern man beneath.

He met her gravely, self-containedly, yet with restrained passion, and
his voice was sternly calm as he began: "I have come to ask you what you
wish to do with Marshall Haney's inheritance? I will not be a party to
your action. I helped him plan out his will, and he said he could trust
you to do the right thing, and I have come to tell you that his will
must be yours."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"He is dead!" he replied.

Her heart turned to ice at the sound of his words, so clear, succinct,
and piercing; then the cedars began to wail and wail, and sway in
eldrich grief, but she who felt most remorse could not utter a sound to
prove her own despair; and in the tumult her dream ended abruptly, and
she woke to hear the night wind whistling weirdly through the screen of
her open window.

She lay in silence, shuddering with the subsiding terror of her vision,
till she came to a full realization of the fact that it was all but a
night terror and that Mart was still alive and her decision not yet
irrevocably made.

She shuddered again--not in grief, but in terror--as she relived the
vivid hour of self-chosen poverty which her dream had brought her. Yes,
the magic of wealth had spoiled her for Sibley and the ranch. To go back
there was impossible. "I will try the East," she said. "The Mosses will
help me." And yet to return to Chicago--after having played the grand
lady--would be bitterly hard. Suppose her friends should meet her with
cold eyes and hesitating words? Suppose they, too, had loved her money
and not herself? Suppose even Joe, who seemed as true as Williams,
should prove to be a selfish sycophant. Ah yes, it would be a different
city with the magic of Haney's money no longer hers to command.

In this hour of deepest misery and despair the sheen of his gold
returned like sunlight after a storm; and yet, even as she permitted
herself to imagine how sweetly the new day would dawn with her
determination to remain the mistress of this great house, the old fear,
the new disgust, returned to plague her. Her love for Ben Fordyce came
also--and the knowledge that Alice was dying of a broken heart because
of Ben's growing indifference--all these perplexities made the coming of
sunlight a mockery.

She rose to the new day quite as undecided as before and more deeply
saddened. One thing was plain--Ben should come no more to visit her--for