terribly calm--"_from the girl
who died believing she was your wife. I am helping bury her to-day.
And you need not come to Westmoreland to-morrow night, nor next week,
nor ever again._"

And Richard Travis, when he read it, turned white to his hard,
bitter, cruel lips, the first time in all his life.

For he knew that now he had no more chance to recall the living than
he had to recall the dead.

CHAPTER XI

THE QUEEN IS DEAD--LONG LIVE THE QUEEN

All that week at the mill, Richard Travis had been making
preparations for his trip to Boston. Regularly twice, and often three
times a year, he had made the same journey, where his report to the
directors was received and discussed. After that, there were always
two weeks of theatres, operas, wine-suppers and dissipations of other
kinds--though never of the grossest sort--for even in sin there is
refinement, and Richard Travis was by instinct and inheritance
refined.

He was not conscious--and who of his class ever are?--of the effects
of the life he was leading--the tightening of this chain of immoral
habits, the searing of what conscience he had, the freezing of all
that was generous and good within him.

Once his nature had been as a lake in midsummer, its surface
shimmering in the sunlight, reflecting something of the beauty that
came to it. Now, cold, sordid, callous, it lay incased in winter ice
and neither could the sunlight go in nor its reflection go out. It
slept on in coarse opaqueness, covered with an impenetrable crust
which he himself did not understand.

"But," said the old Bishop more than once, "God can touch him and he
will thaw like a spring day. There is somethin' great in Richard
Travis if he can only be touched."

But vice cannot reason. Immorality cannot deduce. Only the moral
ponders deeply and knows both the premises and the conclusions,
because only the moral thinks.

Vice, like the poisonous talons of a bird of prey, while it buries
its nails in the flesh of its victim, carries also the narcotic which
soothes as it kills.

And Richard Travis had arrived at this stage. At first it had been
with him any woman, so there was a romance--and hence Maggie. But he
had tired of these, and now it was the woman beautiful as Helen, or
the woman pure and lovely as Alice Westmore.

What a tribute to purity, that impurity worships it the more as
itself sinks lower in the slime of things. It is the poignancy of the
meteorite, which, falli