xed straight ahead over the abyss of the future. Muttering and
cursing, Harrington Chase was led after him from the room, and for a
space there was silence.

Ripley Halstead sat as though turned to stone, his wife had collapsed
in her chair and Mason North's head was buried in his hands. Winthrop
with his arm across his father's shoulders met Vernon's dazed eyes and
with one accord they turned to Willa.

Her quiet, set, terrible smile was unchanged, but her face had blanched
and with an effort she motioned to Jim Baggott.

"Jim, do you remember what happened in Manzanillo away over on the West
Coast ten years ago when you were pay clerk for the Colima-Zamora
Company and a man stuck you up in broad daylight?"

"I sure do!" Jim returned. "I shot him in the head!"

"Not in but across," observed Willa. "You left your mark on him from
brow to ear, only you didn't recognize it while he was here under your
own roof."

"What!" Jim's eyes were fairly starting from his head. "That feller
was a swindling promoter down on his luck; he broke jail afterward, I
heard. His name was Harry Carter."

"It used to be, but now it is Harrington Chase."

The smile faded at last, and Willa swayed suddenly, catching at the bar
for support. Jim Baggott sprang for her, but Thode reached her side
first, and for a moment she clung to him. Then she raised herself
indomitably upright once more.

"It is not easy to hate, after all!" she murmured. "If it were not for
the memory of Dad I could find it in my heart to forgive."

CHAPTER XXV

INTO HER OWN

Spring was well advanced and the Casa de Limas was a veritable paradise
of tender virginal green and delicate mystically perfumed blossoms,
when Willa, a frail shadow of herself, ventured for the first time to
the veranda, on Sallie Bailey's sturdy arm.

The protracted strain and final tragedy of her triumph had proved too
much for even her robust vitality, and when the news came that Starr
Wiley had killed himself in his garrison prison rather than face the
firing squad, the inevitable collapse occurred.

For weeks she had lain helpless and inert with a low fever sapping her
last ounce of strength and no incentive to take up her life again,
until one day she had chanced to overhear a remark of Sallie Bailey's
which brought a new light and glow to her world.

"I declare!" announced Sallie to her husband. "I don't know what to
say to that young Thode every day when he co