r
was winning, the battle.

"We read something about the hard times in the American papers," she
said. "You don't know how far away anything like that seems when there
is an ocean between. And I was hoping all the time that our homeland
down here was escaping."

"Escaping? You came through South Tredegar a little while ago; it is
dead--too dead to bury. You hear the sob of those blowing-engines?--you
will travel two hundred miles in the iron belt before you will hear it
again. When I came home in June we were smashed, like all the other
furnaces in the South--only worse."

"How worse, Tom?"

He forgot the tacit truce for the moment.

"Duxbury Farley and his son had deliberately wrecked the company."

She laid a restraining hand on his arm.

"Let us understand each other," she said gently. "You must not say such
things of Mr. Farley and--and his son to me. If you do, I can't listen."

"You don't believe what I say?"

"I believe you have convinced yourself. But you are vindictive; you know
you are. And I mean to be fair and just."

He let the plodding horse measure a full half-mile before he turned and
looked at her with anger and despair glooming in his eyes.

"Tell me one thing, Ardea, and maybe it will shut my mouth. What is
Vincent Parley to you--anything more than Eva's brother?"

Another young woman might have claimed her undoubted right to evade such
a pointed question. But Ardea saw safety only in instant frankness.

"He has asked me to be his wife, Tom."

"And you have consented?"

"I wonder if I have," she said half-musingly.

"Don't you _know_?" he demanded. And then, "Ardea, I'd rather see you
dead and in your coffin!"

"Just why--apart from your prejudice?"

"It's Beauty and the Beast over again. You don't know Vint Farley."

"Don't I? My opportunities have been very much better than yours," she
retorted.

"That may be, but I say you don't know him. He is a whited sepulcher."

"But you can not particularize," she insisted. "And the evidence is all
the other way."

Tom was silent. During the summer of strugglings he had gone pretty
deeply into the history of Chiawassee Consolidated, and there was
commercial sharp practice in plenty, with some nice balancings on the
edge of criminality. Once, indeed, the balance had been quite lost, but
it was Dyckman who had been thrust into the breach, or who had been
induced to enter it by falsifying his books. Yet these were mere
business matter