the environment of birth to know
that work is not degradation. To them it is the lowering of every
standard of their lives, standards which idleness has erected. And
idleness builds strange standards.

If it had occurred to Helen Conway--if she had been reared to know
that to work honestly for an honest living was the noblest thing in
life, how different would it all have been!

And so at last what is right and what is wrong depend more upon what
has gone before than what follows after. It is more a question of
pedigree and environment than of trials and temptations.

"I shall steal," she repeated--"oh, I know I shall."

And yet, as her father drove her in the old shambling buggy across
the hill road to the town, there stood out in her mind one other
picture which lingered there all day and for many days. She could not
forget it nor cast it from her, and in spite of all her sorrow it
uplifted her as she had been uplifted at times before when, reading
the country newspaper, there had blossomed among its dry pages the
perfume of a stray poem, whose incense entered into her soul of
souls.

It was a young man in his shirt sleeves, his face flushed with work,
his throat bare, plowing on the slope of the hillside for the fall
sowing of wheat.

What a splendid picture he was, silhouetted in the rising sun against
the pink and purple background of sunbeams!

It was Clay Westmore, and he waved his hand in his slow, calm
forceful way as he saw her go by.

It was a little thing, but it comforted her. She remembered it long.

The mill had been running several hours when Kingsley looked up, and
saw standing before him at his office window a girl of such stately
beauty that he stood looking sillily at her, and wondering.

He did not remember very clearly afterwards anything except this
first impression; that her hair was plaited in two rich coils upon
her head, and that never before had he seen so much beauty in a
gingham dress.

He remembered, too, that her eyes, which held him spellbound, wore
more an expression of despair and even desperation than of youthful
hope. He could not understand why they looked that way, forerunners
as they were of such a face and hair.

And so he stood, sillily smiling, until Richard Travis arose from his
desk and came forward to meet her.

She nodded at him and tried to smile, but Kingsley noticed that it
died away into drawn, hard lines around her pretty mouth.

"It is Miss Conway,