m back the spirit of his youth.

"Gaston Isbel an' I were boys together in Weston, Texas," began Jorth,
in swift, passionate voice. "We went to school together. We loved the
same girl--your mother. When the war broke out she was engaged to
Isbel. His family was rich. They influenced her people. But she
loved me. When Isbel went to war she married me. He came back an'
faced us. God! I'll never forget that. Your mother confessed her
unfaithfulness--by Heaven! She taunted him with it. Isbel accused me
of winnin' her by lies. But she took the sting out of that.

"Isbel never forgave her an' he hounded me to ruin. He made me out a
card-sharp, cheatin' my best friends. I was disgraced. Later he
tangled me in the courts--he beat me out of property--an' last by
convictin' me of rustlin' cattle he run me out of Texas."

Black and distorted now, Jorth's face was a spectacle to make Ellen
sick with a terrible passion of despair and hate. The truth of her
father's ruin and her own were enough. What mattered all else? Jorth
beat the table with fluttering, nerveless hands that seemed all the
more significant for their lack of physical force.

"An' so help me God, it's got to be wiped out in blood!" he hissed.

That was his answer to the wavering and nobility of Ellen. And she in
her turn had no answer to make. She crept away into the corner behind
the curtain, and there on her couch in the semidarkness she lay with
strained heart, and a resurging, unconquerable tumult in her mind. And
she lay there from the middle of that afternoon until the next morning.

When she awakened she expected to be unable to rise--she hoped she
could not--but life seemed multiplied in her, and inaction was
impossible. Something young and sweet and hopeful that had been in her
did not greet the sun this morning. In their place was a woman's
passion to learn for herself, to watch events, to meet what must come,
to survive.

After breakfast, at which she sat alone, she decided to put Isbel's
package out of the way, so that it would not be subjecting her to
continual annoyance. The moment she picked it up the old curiosity
assailed her.

"Shore I'll see what it is, anyway," she muttered, and with swift hands
she opened the package. The action disclosed two pairs of fine, soft
shoes, of a style she had never seen, and four pairs of stockings, two
of strong, serviceable wool, and the others of a finer texture. Ellen
looked at t