er the wild grape vine.

How sweet and peaceful it was, and yet how changed since but a short
time ago she had sat there watching for Harry!

"Harry"--she pulled out the crumpled, tear-stained note from her
bosom and read it again. And the reading surprised her. She expected
to weep, but instead when she had finished she sat straight up on the
mossy rock and from her eyes gleamed again the light before which the
political enemies of the old dead Governor had so often quailed.

Nor did it change in intensity, when, at the sound of wheels and the
clatter of hoofs, she instinctively dropped down on the moss behind
the rock and saw through the grape leaves one of Richard Travis's
horses, steaming hot, and stepping,--right up to its limit--a
clipping gait down the road.

She had dropped instinctively because she guessed it was Harry. And
instinctively, too, she knew the girl with the loud boisterous laugh
beside him was Nellie.

The buggy was wheeled so rapidly past that she heard only broken
notes of laughter and talk. Then she sat again upon her rock, with
the deep flush in her eyes, and said:

"I hate--him--I hate him--and oh--to think--"

She tore his note into fragments, twisted and rolled them into a ball
and shot it, as a marble, into the gulch below.

Then, suddenly she remembered, and reaching over she looked into a
scarred crevice in the rock. Twice that summer had Clay Westmore left
her a quaint love note in this little rock-lined post-office. Quaint
indeed, and they made her smile, for they had been queer mixtures of
geology and love. But they were honest--and they had made her flush
despite the fact that she did not love him.

Still she would read them two or three times and sigh and say: "Poor
Clay--" after every reading.

"Surely there will be one this afternoon," she thought as she peeped
over.

But there was not, and it surprised her to know how much she was
disappointed.

"Even Clay has forgotten me," she said as she arose hastily to go.

A big sob sprang up into her throat and the Conway light of defiance,
that had blazed but a few moments before in her eyes, died in the
depths of the cloud of tears which poured between it and the open.

A cruel, dangerous mood came over her. It enveloped her soul in its
sombre hues and the steel of it struck deep.

She scarcely remembered her dead mother--only her eyes. But when
these moods came upon Helen Conway--and her life had been one wherein
they