"I oughtn't to
stay, Molly."

And she motioned him away with her face hidden and sobbed, "No--I
know it."

He paused a moment on the step before her and then said, "Good-by,
Molly--I'm going now." And she heard him walking down the yard on the
grass, so that his footsteps would not arouse the house. It seemed to
them both that it was midnight, but time had moved slowly, and when
the spent, broken woman crept into the house, and groped her way to
her room, she did not make a light, but slipped into bed without
looking at her scarred, shameful face.

CHAPTER XVIII

In the sunshine of that era of world-wide prosperity in the eighties,
John Barclay made much hay. He spent little time in Sycamore Ridge,
and his private car might be found in Minnesota to-day and at the end
of the week in California. As president of the Corn Belt Road and as
controlling director in the North Lake Line, he got rates on other
railroads for his grain products that no competitor could duplicate.
And when a competitor began to grow beyond the small fry class,
Barclay either bought him out or built a mill beside the offender and
crushed him out. Experts taught him the value of the chaff from the
grain. He had a dozen mills to which he shipped the refuse from his
flour and heaven only knows what else, and turned the stuff into
various pancake flours and breakfast foods. He spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars in advertising--in a day when large
appropriations for advertising were unusual. And the words "Barclay's
Best" glared at the traveller from crags in the Rocky Mountains and
from the piers of all the great harbour bridges. He used Niagara to
glorify the name of Barclay, and "Use Barclay's Best" had to be washed
off the statue of the Goddess of Liberty in New York Harbour. The
greenish brown eyes of the little man were forever looking into space,
and when he caught a dream, instead of letting it go, he called a
stenographer and made it come true. In those days he was beginning to
realize that an idea plus a million dollars will become a fact if a
man but says the word, whereas the same idea minus a million remains a
dream. The great power of money was slowly becoming part of the man's
consciousness. During the years that were to come, he came to think
that there was nothing impossible. Any wish he had might be gratified.
Such a consciousness drives men mad.

But in those prosperous days, while the millions were piling up,
Barcl