thought of--loved--her.

Margaret--her loneliness--the sadness of her life, all haunted him.
She lived, he knew, alone, in her cottage--an outcast from society.
He had looked but once in her eyes and caught the lingering look of
appeal which unconsciously lay there. He knew she loved him yet--it
was there as plain as in his own face was written the fact that he
loved her. He thought of himself--of her. Then he said:

"For fifteen years I have robbed--killed--oh, God--killed--how it
hurts me now! All the category of crime in bitter wickedness I have
run. And she--once--and now an angel--Bishop himself says so."

"I am a new man--I am a respectable and honest man,"--here he arose
on his cot and drew himself up--"I am Jack Smith--Mr. Jack Smith, the
blacksmith, and my word is my bond."

He slipped out quietly. Once again in the cool night, under the stars
which he had learned to love as brothers and whose silent paths
across the heavens were to him old familiar footpaths, he felt at
ease, and his nervousness left him.

He had not intended to speak to Margaret then--for he thought she was
asleep. He wished only to guard her cabin, up among the stunted old
field pines--while she slept--to see the room he knew she slept
in--the little window she looked out of every day.

The little cabin was a hallowed spot to him. Somehow he knew--he felt
that whatever might be said--in it he knew an angel dwelt. He could
not understand--he only knew.

There is a moral sense within us that is a greater teacher than
either knowledge or wisdom.

For an hour he stood with his head uncovered watching the little
cabin where she lived. Everything about it was sacred, because
Margaret lived there. It was pretty, too, in its neatness and
cleanliness, and there were old-fashioned flowers in the yard and
old-fashioned roses clambered on the rock wall.

He sat down in the path--the little white sanded path down which he
knew she went every day, and so made sacred by her footsteps.

"Perhaps, I am near one of them now," he said--and he kissed the
spot.

And that night and many others did the outlaw watch over the lonely
cabin on the mountain side. And she, the outcast woman, slept within,
unconscious that she was being protected by the man who had loved her
all his life.

CHAPTER XIII

THE THEFT OF A CHILDHOOD

The Watts children were up the next morning by four o'clock.

Mrs. Watts ate, always, by candle-light. The sun, she