ered her a maid,
glad that the arms of her home were about her.

With remorseless honesty she went back over her years. Always in the past
months of suffering she had blamed this or that extraneous circumstance
with her undoing; now she saw and recognised and acknowledged that
nothing and nobody had brought disaster upon her but herself. It was not
because Blatchley Turrentine was a bad, lawless man, not because the boys
were reckless fellows, led and influenced by him, that all this trouble
had come. If she, Judith Barrier, had dealt fairly and humbly by her
world, she might have had the lover of her choice in peace as other girls
had--even as Cliantha and Pendrilla had. But no, such enterprises as
contented these, such stir as they made among their kind, would not do
her. She must seek to cast her spells upon every eligible man within her
reach. She must try her hand at subjugating those who were difficult,
pride herself on the skill with which she retained half a dozen in
anxious doubt as to her ultimate intentions concerning them.

Her forehead drooped to the window pane and her cheeks burned as she
recollected times and seasons and scenes that belonged to the years when
Blatch was building up his firm belief that she loved him, and would
sometime marry him. It had been a spirited, dangerous game to her then,
nothing more.

Her passionate, possessive nature was winning to higher ground, leaving,
with pain and travail of spirit, the plane on which her twenty years had
been lived. The past months of thwarting, failure, and heart-hunger had
prepared for this movement, to-night it was almost consciously making.
She was coming to the place where, if she might not have love, she could
at least be worthy of it. The little clock which had measured her vigils
that night of the dumb supper slanted toward twelve. She got to her feet
with a long sigh. She did not know yet what she meant to do or to forbear
doing; but she was aware, with relief, of a radical change within her, a
something awakened there which could consider the right of Creed--even of
Huldah; which could submit to failure, to rejection--and be kind. Slowly
she gathered up her belongings and took her way downstairs.

When the door of the sick-room closed behind the boys, she went and knelt
down beside the bed and looked fixedly at the sleeper. With the birth of
this new spiritual impulse the things Blatch Turrentine had said of Creed
and Creed's intentions dro