she was thinking, with repugnance
in her heart, of the indignity to which she had been subjected at her
father's door. Yet the kisses Ray had forced on her were no worse than
his blasphemy of her dreams. The spirit of romance was abroad
to-night--in the enchantment of the moon--and she was wistful and
imaginative as never before. This was just the normal expression of her
starved girlhood--the same childlike wistfulness with which a Cinderella
might long for her prince--just as natural and as wholesome and as much
a part of youth as laughter and happiness.

"I won't believe him, I won't believe him," she told herself. Her
thought turned to other channels, and her heart spoke its wish.
"Wherever he is--sometime he'll come to me."

VI

At a little town at the end of steel Ben and Ezram ended the first lap
of their journey. They had had good traveling these past days. Steadily
they had gone north, through the tilled lands of Northern Washington,
through the fertile valleys of lower British Columbia, traversing great
mountain ranges and penetrating gloomy forests, and now had come to the
bank of a north-flowing river,--a veritable flood and one of the monarch
rivers of the North. Every hour their companionship had been more close
and their hopes higher. Every waking moment Ben had been swept with
thankfulness for the chance that had come to him.

They had worked for their meals and passage--hard, manual toil--but it
had seemed only play to them both. Sometimes they mended fence,
sometimes helped at farm labor, and one gala morning, with entire good
will and cheer, they beat into cleanliness every carpet in a widow's
cottage. And the sign of the outcast was fading from Ben's flesh.

The change was marked in his face. His eye seemed more clear and
steadfast, his lips more firm, the lines of his face were not so hard
and deep. His fellows of the underworld would have scarcely known him
now,--his lips and chin darkening with beard and this new air of
self-respect upon him. Perhaps they had forgotten him, but it was no
less than he had done to them. The prison walls seemed already as if
they hadn't been true. He loved every minute of the journey, freshness
instead of filth, freedom instead of confinement, fragrant fields and
blossoming flowers. Ever the stars and the moon, remembered of old,
yielded him a peace and happiness beyond his power to tell. And his
gratitude to Ezram grew apace.

Besides self-confidence a