like," she
announced with a fine abandon of recklessness.

Feeling like watchers beside a jury-room door, the two bridesmaids kept
vigil, harboring contrary hopes.

Left alone in her room, the girl stood for a while gazing about her as
if her wild eyes were seeking for some secret panel that might open in
the walls and give her escape. She must think! There was little enough
time at best to bring order out of this panic-ridden confusion of her
thoughts. But her mind was like a stream in freshet. It could only race
and swirl along one channel, and that was the spillway of memories.

Stuart Farquaharson the boy; Stuart the man, coming to her at Chatham;
Stuart standing self-governed as her father scourged him with abuse;
Stuart the lover; all those semblances passed before her until her
world seemed peopled with them, and her old love grew clamorous in
resurrection--and insurrection.

In a little while she would be--unless she halted here--holding up her
hand for Eben's ring, and at the thought a sickness swept over her. It
was impossible. Instead of victory it was, after all, an abject and
hideous surrender. She could not face it and all that must come after
it.

Then she heard a feeble rap on her door. At the threshold stood the
wheelchair to which her father was confined like a slave chained to his
seat in the galley. She caught a brief impression of a pair of eyes
beyond him: the eyes of Eleanor Kent, full of the message of strength;
eyes that seemed to be saying, "Stand firm. Be sure!" But nearer at hand
was the face with skin drawn like parchment over its bony angles, deeply
lined with suffering, and crowned with a great shock of snowy hair.

The features, though, were only details of setting for the spirit of the
keen eyes that had always burned with an eagle fierceness and an
unyielding aggressiveness. Now they were different, and as the guests
who had brought the chair and its occupant up the stairs and into the
room withdrew in silent respect, the daughter's gaze was held by them
with a mesmeric force.

It was a face transfigured; a face in which the hardness of fight had
died into the serenity of peace.

Angles and wrinkles had become only lines of emphasis for this new
tranquillity of the eyes; eyes that might have seen a vision of divine
accolade and were at peace.

"My daughter," he said, as soon as they were alone together, and his
voice held the music of a benediction, "you are standing at the