han herself, whom Rube Haman had
married and driven to her grave within a year--the sweet Lucy, with the
name of her father's mother. Lucy had been all English in face and tongue,
a flower of the west, driven to darkness by this horse-dealing brute, who,
before he was arrested and tried for murder, was about to marry Kate
Wimper. Kate Wimper had stolen him from Lucy before Lucy's first and only
child was born, the child that could not survive the warm mother-life
withdrawn, and so had gone down the valley whither the broken-hearted
mother had fled. It was Kate Wimper, who, before that, had waylaid the one
man for whom she herself had ever cared, and drawn him from her side by
such attractions as she herself would keep for an honest wife, if such she
ever chanced to be. An honest wife she would have been had Kate Wimper not
crossed the straight path of her life. The man she had loved was gone to
his end also, reckless and hopeless, after he had thrown away his chance
of a lifetime with Loisette Alroyd. There had been left behind this girl,
to whom tragedy had come too young, who drank humiliation with a heart as
proud as ever straightly set its course through crooked ways.

It had hurt her, twisted her nature a little, given a fountain of
bitterness to her soul, which welled up and flooded her life sometimes. It
had given her face no sourness, but it put a shadow into her eyes.

She had been glad when Haman was condemned for murder, for she believed he
had committed it, and ten times hanging could not compensate for that dear
life gone from their sight--Lucy, the pride of her father's heart. She was
glad when Haman was condemned, because of the woman who had stolen him
from Lucy, because of that other man, her lover, gone out of her own life.
The new hardness in her rejoiced that now the woman, if she had any heart
at all, must have it bowed down by this supreme humiliation and wrung by
the ugly tragedy of the hempen rope.

And now this man before her, this man with a boy's face, with the dark,
luminous eyes, whom she had saved from the frozen plains, he had that in
his breast which would free Haman, so he had said. A fury had its birth in
her at that moment. Something seemed to seize her brain and master it,
something so big that it held all her faculties in perfect control, and
she felt herself in an atmosphere where all life moved round her
mechanically, she herself the only sentient thing, so much greater than
all s