e could not remember when
anything had been so hard for him to bear. Later he had heard how she
had gone to work in the mill, and he knew that it meant an end of her
love affair with Harry.

To-night something told him it was time to see her again, not to tell
her of his own love, and how it would never change, whether she was
mill girl or the mistress of Millwood, but to encourage her in the
misery of it all.

Work--and did not he himself love to work? Was it not the noblest
thing of life?

He would tell her it was.

He was surprised when he saw what had just happened; but all his life
he had controlled himself to such a degree that in critical moments
he was coolest; and so what with another might have been a serious
affair, he had turned into half retributive fun, but the deadliest
punishment, as it afterwards turned out, that he could have inflicted
on a temperament and nature such as Harry Travis'. For that young
man, unable to stand the gibes of the neighborhood and the sarcasm of
his uncle when it all became known, accepted a position in another
town and never came back again.

To have been shot or floored in true melodramatic style by his rival,
as he stood on a rock with a helpless girl in his clutch, would have
been more to his liking than to be picked up bodily, by the nape of
his neck, and taken from the scene of his exploits like a pig across
a saddle.

That kind of a combat did not meet his ideas of chivalry.

Helen was dressed in her prettiest gown when Clay rode back to
Millwood, after securing the samples he had started for. She knew he
was coming and so she tied a white scarf over her head and went again
to her favorite seat beneath the trees.

"I don't know how to thank you, Clay," she said, as he swung down
from his saddle and threw his leathern bag on the grass.

"Now, you look more like yourself," he smiled admiringly, as he
looked down on her white dress and auburn hair, drooping low over her
neck and shoulders.

"Tell me about yourself and how you like it at the mill," he went on
as he sat down.

"Oh, you will not be willing to speak to me now--now that I am a
mill-girl," she added. "Do you know? Clay--"

"I know that, aside from being beautiful, you have just begun to be
truly womanly in my sight."

"Oh, Clay, do you really think that? It is the first good word that
has been spoken to me since--since my--disgrace."

He turned quickly: "Your disgrace! Do you call it disgrace t