ern Express rolled out with increasing
speed. On the rear platform stood a laughing young woman bedecked in
many colors, and beside her a tall youth with a curly yellow head, whom
the boy pointed out as Sandy MacPherson. He was beyond the reach of
vengeance for the time. But his features stamped themselves ineffaceably
on the avenger's memory. As the latter turned away, to bide his time in
grim silence, the young woman on the platform of the car said to her
husband, "I wonder who that was, Sandy, that looked like he was going to
run after the cars! Didn't you see? His arms kind o' jerked out, like
that; but he didn't start after all. There he goes up the hill, with one
pant-leg in his boot. He looked kind of wild. I'm just as glad he didn't
get aboard!"

"He's one of your old fellers as you've give the go-by to, I kind of
suspicion, Sis," replied the young man with a laugh. And the train
roared into a cutting.

About a year after these events Vandine's wife died, and Vandine
thereupon removed, with Sarah and her baby, to the interior of the
province, settling down finally at Aspohegan Mills. Here he built
himself a small cottage, on a steep slope overlooking the mill; and here
Sarah, by her quiet and self-sacrificing devotion to her father and her
child, wiped out the memory of her error and won the warm esteem of the
settlement. As for the child, he grew into a handsome, blue-eyed, sturdy
boy, whom his grandfather loved with a passionate tenderness intensified
by a subtle strain of pity. As year by year his daughter and the boy
twined themselves ever closer about his heart, Vandine's hate against
the man who had wronged them both kept ever deepening to a keener
anguish.

But now at last the day had come. When first he had caught sight of
MacPherson in the yard below, the impulse to rush down and throttle him
was so tremendous that as he curbed it the blood forsook his face,
leaving it the color of ashes, and for a few seconds he could not tend
his saw. Presently, when the yelping little demon was again at work
biting across the timbers, the foreman drew near, and Vandine asked him,
"Who's the new hand down yonder?"

"Oh!" said the foreman, leaning a little over the bench to follow
Vandine's pointing, "yon's one Sandy MacPherson, from over on the
Kennebec. He's been working in Maine these seven year past, but says he
kind of got a hankering after his own country, an' so he's come back.
Good hand!"

"_That_ so!" w