proud and tender and on his face such a smile as
lovers only wear. Then he led her in,--pale and tearful.

The little church had been prettily decorated that Sabbath morning,
and when the old preacher came forward and called them to him, he
said the simple words which made them man and wife, and as he blessed
them, praying, a mocking-bird, perched on a limb near the window,
sang a soft low melody as if one singer wished to compliment another.

They went out hand in hand, and when they reached the door, the sun
which had been hid burst out as a benediction upon them.

Among the guests one man had stepped in unnoticed and unseen. Why he
came he could not tell, for never before did he have any desire to go
to the little church.

It was midnight when the news came to him that Tom Travis had
returned as from the dead. It was Jud Carpenter who had awakened him
that Saturday night to whisper at the bedside the startling news.

But Travis only yawned from his sleep and said: "I've been expecting
it all the time--go somewhere and go to bed."

After Carpenter had gone, he arose, stricken with a feeling he could
not describe, but had often seen in race horses running desperately
until within fifty yards of the wire, and then suddenly--quitting. He
had almost reached his goal--but now one week had done all this.
Alice--gone, and The Gaffs--he must divide that with his cousin--for
his grandfather had left no will.

Divide The Gaffs with Tom Travis?--He would as soon think of dividing
Alice's love with him. In the soul of Richard Travis there was no
such word as division.

In the selfishness of his life, it had ever been all or nothing.

All night he thought, he walked the halls of the old house, he ran
over a hundred solutions of it in his mind. And still there was no
solution that satisfied him, that seemed natural. It seemed that his
mind, which had heretofore worked so unerringly, deducing things so
naturally, now balked before an abyss that was bridgeless. Heretofore
he had looked into the future with the bold, true sweep of an eagle
peering from its mountain home above the clouds into the far
distance, his eyes unclouded by the mist, which cut off the vision of
mortals below. But now he was the blindest of the blind. He seemed to
stop as before a wall--a chasm which ended everything--a chasm, on
the opposite wall of which was printed: Thus far and no farther.

Think as he would, he could not think beyond it. His lif