f its proper sense of
delight. Yet delight was more than far off. Elvine was a prey to a
hopelessness which nothing seemed able to relieve.

Summer was not yet over, although the signs of the coming fall were by
no means lacking. The hard trail, like some carefully set out
terra-cotta ribbon upon a field of tawny green, took them through a
region of busy harvesting. The tractors and threshers were busily
engaged in many directions. Great stacks of straw testified to the
ample harvest in progress. Fall ploughing had already begun, and
high-wheeled wagons bore their burden of produce toward the distant
elevators. Then, too, human freight passed them, happy, smiling
freight of old and young, whose sun-scorched faces reflected something
of the joy of life and general prosperity prevailing.

A radiant sun looked down upon the scenes through which they passed.
It was the wonderful ripening God almost worshipped of these people who
lived by the fruits of the earth. Jeffrey Masters understood it all,
and reveled in the pleasant senses it stirred. For he, too, lived by
the fruits of the earth, although his harvest was garnered in the flesh
of creature kind.

Elvine looked on with eyes that beheld but saw nothing of that which
inspired her husband. Remembrance claimed her. Too well she
remembered. And gladly would she have shut out such sights altogether,
for more and more surely they crushed her already depressed spirits to
a depth from which it seemed impossible to raise them.

Nor was her beautiful face without some reflection of this. Her smile
was ready for the man at her side. She laughed and talked in a manner
so care-free that he could never have suspected. But in repose, when
no eyes were upon her, a lurking, hunted dread peered furtively out of
her dark eyes, and the fine-drawn lines gathered about her shapely
lips, and seriously marred the serenity of their youthful contours.

She had one purpose now, one only. It was to ward off the blow which
she knew might fall at any moment when she reached her new home. The
threat of it was with her always. It drove her to panic in the dark of
night. It left her watchful and fearful in the light of day. At all
times the memory of her husband's words dinned through her brain like
the haunt of some sickening melody.

"Now I only hope the good God'll let me come up with the man who took
the price of his blood."

It had been spoken coldly. It had been spok