ngent the night air with aromatic breath; through old sedge
fields, garish in the faint light; up, up the mountain, over it; and
at last the mare stopped and stood silently by a newly made grave,
while Richard Travis, with strained hard mouth and wet eyes, knelt
and, knowing that no hand in the world cared to feel his repentant
face in it, he buried it in the new made sod as he cried:
"Maggie--Maggie--forgive me, for the hand of God hath touched me!"

And it soothed him, for he knew that if she were alive he might have
lain his head there--on her breast.

CHAPTER XVI

MAMMY MARIA

That Monday was a memorable day for Helen Conway. She went to the
mill with less bitterness than ever before--the sting of it all was
gone--for she felt that she was helpless to the fate that was
hers--that she was powerless in the hands of Richard Travis:

"_I will come for you Monday night. I will take you away from here.
You shall belong to me forever--My Queen!_"

These words had rung in her ears all Saturday night, when, after
coming home, she had found her father fallen by the wayside.

In the night she had lain awake and wondered. She did not know where
she was going--she did not care. She did not even blush at the
thought of it. She was hardened, steeled. She knew not whether it
meant wife or mistress. She knew only that, as she supposed, God had
placed upon her more than she could bear.

"If my life is wrecked," she said as she lay awake that Sunday
night--"God himself will do it. Who took my mother before I knew her
influence? Who made me as I am and gave me poverty with this fatal
beauty--poverty and a drunken father and this terrible temptation?"

"Oh, if I only had her, Mammy--negro that she is."

Lily was asleep with one arm around her sister's neck.

"What will become of Lily, in the mill, too?" She bent and kissed
her, and she saw that the little one, though asleep, had tears in her
own eyes.

Young as she was, Helen's mind was maturer than might have been
supposed. And the problem which confronted her she saw very clearly,
although she was unable to solve it. The problem was not new, indeed,
it has been Despair's conundrum since the world began: Whose fault
that my life has been as it is? In her despair, doubting, she cried:

"Is there really a God, as Mammy Maria told me? Does He interpose in
our lives, or are we rushed along by the great moral and physical
laws, which govern the universe; and if by ch