, knew that he left it
forever.

"The Queen is dead--long live the Queen," he said bitterly.

And then there happened what always happens to the thing in the
mud--he sank deeper--desperately deeper.

Now--now he would have Helen Conway. He would have her and own her,
body and soul. He would take her away--as he had planned, and keep
her away. That was easy, too--too far away for the whisper of it ever
to come back. If he failed in that he would marry her. She was
beautiful--and with a little more age and education she would grace
The Gaffs. So he might marry her and set her up, a queen over their
heads.

This was his determination when he went to the mill the first of the
week. All the week he watched her, talked with her, was pleasant,
gallant and agreeable. But he soon saw that Helen was not the same.
There was not the dull wistful resignation in her look, and despair
had given way to a cheerfulness he could not understand. There was a
brightness in her eyes which made her more beautiful.

The unconscious grip which the shamelessness of it all had over him
was evidenced in what he did. He confided his plans to Jud Carpenter,
and set him to work to discover the cause.

"See what's wrong," he said significantly. "I am going to take that
girl North with me, and away from here. After that it is no affair of
yours."

"Anything wrong?" He had reached the point of his moral degradation
when right for Helen meant wrong for him.

Jud, with a characteristic shrewdness, put his finger quickly on the
spot.

Edward Conway was sober. Clay saw her daily.

"But jes' wait till I see him ag'in--down there. I'll make him drunk
enough. Then you'll see a change in the Queen--hey?"

And he laughed knowingly. With a little more bitterness she would go
to the end of the world with him.

It was that day he held her hands in the old familiar way, but when
he would kiss her at the gate she still fled, crimson, away.

The next morning Clay Westmore walked with her to the mill, and
Travis lilted his eyebrows haughtily:

"If anything of that kind happens," he said to himself, "nothing can
save me."

He watched her closely--how beautiful she looked that day--how
regally beautiful! She had come wearing the blue silk gown, with the
lace and beads which had been her mother's. In sheer delight Travis
kept slipping to the drawing-in room door to watch her work. Her
posture, beautifully Greek, before the machine, so natural that it