n the step of the portico, looking out down the
pike.

Seth paused, his hand on the latch, seeing which the woman shook her
head negatively.

Seth raised the latch, whereupon she suddenly stood, frowning.

"I have nothing for you," she called out raspingly. "There is not a
thing in the house to eat. Go away! Go away!"

"Celia!" Seth cried out, stabbed to the heart. "I am not a beggar for
bread, but give me a crust of kindness for the love of God! I am
Seth."

CHAPTER XXIV.

[Illustration]

Seen from afar off by the loving eyes of memory, the cows' horns are
longer than they are close by.

The kitchen was old and smoky. Once on a time it had been regularly
calcimined, twice a year, or three times, but it had been many years
now since it had undergone this cleanly process.

Celia's welcome of Seth had been according to her nature, all the more
hardened now by seclusion and poverty. She heard without emotion of
the death of the child. It mattered little to her. She had never known
him. Seth, come back to her a failure, a tramp, was deserving of scant
courtesy. She meted it out to him as it seemed to her he deserved.

The miles he had travelled counted little. Since he had proven himself
too great a failure to travel as men do, it was only just that he
should work his way, sleep in fence corners, live on crusts and walk.

It was one of her theories that, given sufficient time, all men and
animals sink to their level.

Who was Seth that he should be exempt from this law?

The thought occurred to her that he had come to her as a last
recourse. That, unable to make his own living, he had come to share
hers.

That thought scarcely served to add warmth to her welcome.

Seth sat on a chair against the blackened wall in the position of the
tramp who has covered weary distances, whose every bone aches with the
extreme intensity of fatigue.

He was like a rag that had been thrown there.

As Celia had watched him get their first supper in the dugout, so he
now watched her. As she had sat bitterly disillusioned in the darkness
of the hole in the ground, so he sat within the four close walls of
the smoke-begrimed kitchen of her old Kentucky home, disillusioned
beyond compare.

In the once sunny hair there were streaks of gray, but it was not
that. There were wrinkles beneath the blue eyes that had not lost
their sternness, the cold blue of their intensity, the chill and
penetrating frost of their gaze.