y
devoured the beauty, which for so long had held him its slave.

It was nearly two months since the happenings which had so nearly
ended Jim Thorpe's earthly career. Two months during which he had
honestly struggled to regain that footing he had once held in the
district. And now the fall was advancing, and the hopes of winning
through with the people of the place seemed as far off as ever.

Prejudice still clung. Barnriff, willing enough to accept his actual
innocence on the double charges made against him, still could not
forget that he had helped the real thief to escape. It mattered
nothing to them that in the end the man had died a violent death. He
had been helped to escape--their justice. So there was no employment
of any sort in Barnriff for Jim Thorpe. And Eve, too, was only
completing orders which had been placed with her weeks before.

"There," she said, raising her needle and removing the stuff from
beneath it. "I hate it, and I'm glad it's done."

She looked up with a smile to encounter the dark eyes of Jim Thorpe.

"You?" she cried, in a tone that should have made him glad. "Why, I
thought surely it was Annie. But there, I might have known. Annie
would not have sat silent so long. You see she was coming over for a
gossip. But I s'pose it's too early for her."

Jim noticed now that something of the old happy light was in her eyes
again. That joyous light which he had not seen in them for nearly a
year. What a wonderful thing was youth.

"I saw her as I came along," he said slowly. "She said she'd come
_after_ supper. She sent her love, and said she was going to bring a
shirt-waist to get fixed."

"The dear thing! It's the one thing that makes my life here possible,
Jim. I mean her friendship. She's the only one in all the village that
can forget things. I mean among the women." She came round the table
and sat on its edge facing him, staring out of the window at the ruddy
sunset with eyes that had suddenly become shadowed with regret. "Men
aren't like that, it seems to me. They're fierce, and violent, and all
that, but most of them have pretty big hearts when their anger is
past."

Jim's eyes smiled whimsically.

"Do you think so?" he said. "Guess maybe I won't contradict you, but
it seems to me I've learned pretty well how large their hearts are--in
the last two months."

"You mean--you can get no work?"

The man nodded. But he had no bitterness now. He had learned his
lesson from Peter Bl