r vacillating love. I'm so sure of
him that I'm perfectly willing to stake everything on it. I'm willing,
if I'm wrong, even to pay off my mortgage!"

"Since you take that view," said her father, "I'm sorry to have repeated
the story. I hadn't regarded it as so damning, myself. Young men
sometimes love more than once without forfeiting all human respect. You
might ask Boone about it? I don't fancy he'd lie to you."

"I will ask him," she vehemently declared, "and if there's any atom of
truth in it--and I know there isn't--I don't care whom I marry or what
happens afterwards! As to Uncle Tom, I don't think I can go on another
day being his charity child."

"If you don't, you'll break his heart," her father told her, in a voice
of urgent persuasiveness. "For the present, at least, you must regard
what I've told you as Masonically confidential."

"Why?"

"Because he would see himself as having hurt you where he sought only to
be a loving magician with a wand of kindness, and I'm not the man to
injure him like that." He hesitated, and the climax of his statement
came with explosive suddenness. "Good God, Anne, he's just saved me from
disgrace."

Then came the story of Colonel Wallifarro's latest benefaction, and at
the end of it the girl pressed her hands to temples that were hot.

"I think," she said falteringly, "I'll go out for a while where the air
is fresher. It's very close in here."

The door closed silently, almost stealthily, behind her, and Masters
thought she walked with the noiseless care of one moving in a chamber of
death.

CHAPTER XXXVI

Anne Masters looked out of the car windows with shadowed and preoccupied
eyes on that journey from the mountains back to Louisville. The old
conductor who always stopped and chatted with her, after a glance at her
expression, punched her ticket and passed on. Something was not well
with her, he reflected.

To this girl, the joyous sense of freedom had been the essence of life,
and now she was going home with the feeling of one who has passed under
a yoke. It was as if henceforth she were to know the sea which she had
adventurously sailed in liberty only from the chained oar bench of the
galley slave. She felt humiliated and utterly miserable, and perhaps,
worst of all, she was oppressed by an unrelieved realization of her own
futility. Beside the competence of the young woman who took dictation at
Morgan's desk, her own social accomplishments appeared fo