e said, "you keep forgetting. I say I--I am--was--" She
stopped confused.

He looked hurt for a moment and smiled in his frank way: "I know it
is here," he said holding up a bit of coal--"here, by the million
tons, and it is mine by right of birth and education and breeding. It
is my heritage to find it. One day Alabama steel will outrank
Pittsburgh's. Oh, to put my name there as the discoverer!"

"Then you"--he turned and said it fondly--reverently--"you should be
mine by right of--of love."

She sighed.

"Clay--I am sorry for you. I can never love you that way. You have
told me that, since--oh, since I can remember, and I have always told
you--you know we are cousins, anyway--second cousins." She shook her
head.

"Under the heart of the flinty hill lies the coal," he said simply.

But she did not understand him. She had looked down and seen Harry's
foot-track on the moss.

And so they sat until the first star arose and shimmered through the
blue mist which lay around the far off purpling hill tops. Then there
was the clang of a dinner bell.

"It is Mammy Maria," she said--"I must go. No--you must not walk
home with me. I'd rather be alone."

She did not intend it, but it was brutal to have said it that way--to
the sensitive heart it went to. He looked hurt for a moment and then
tried to smile in a weak way. Then he raised his hat gallantly,
turned and went off down the gulch.

Helen stood looking for the last time on the pretty arbor. Here she
had lost her heart--her life. She fell on the moss again and kissed
the stone. Then she walked home--in tears.

CHAPTER VII

HILLARD WATTS

It is good for the world now and then to go back to first principles
in religion. It would be better for it never to get away from them;
but, since it has that way of doing--of breeding away and breaking
away from the innate good--it is well that a man should be born in
any age with the faith of Abraham.

It matters not from what source such a man may spring. And he need
have no known pedigree at all, except an honest ancestry behind him.

Such a man was Hillard Watts, the Cottontown preacher.

Sprung from the common people of the South, he was a most uncommon
man, in that he had an absolute faith in God and His justice, and an
absolute belief that some redeeming goodness lay in every human
being, however depraved he may seem to the world. And so firm was his
faith, so simple his religion--so contrary to the wor