s mine--Richard Travis's--mine--mine! I who have been
buffeted and abused by Fate, given all on earth I do not want, and
denied the one thing I'd die for; I'll show them who they are up
against. I'll take her, and they may talk and rave and shoot and be
damned!"

His old bitterness was returning. His face flushed:

"That's the way you love to hear me talk, isn't it--to go on and say
I'll take her and do as I please with her, and if it pleases me to
marry her I'll set her up over them all--heh?"

Jud nodded.

"That's one of me," said Travis--"the old one. This is the new." And
he opened the back of his watch where a tiny lock of Alice Westmore's
auburn hair lay: "Oh, if I were only worthy to kiss it!"

He walked into the mill and down to the little room where Helen sat.
He stood a while at the door and watched her--the poise of the
beautiful head, the cheeks flushed with the good working blood that
now flowed through them, the hair falling with slight disorder, a
stray lock of it dashed across her forehead and setting off the rest
of it, darker and deeper, as a cloudlet, inlaid with gold, the sunset
of her cheeks.

His were the eyes of a connoisseur when it came to women, and as he
looked he knew that every line of her was faultless; the hands
slender and beautifully high-born; the fingers tapering with that
artistic slope of the tips, all so plainly visible now that they were
at work. One foot was thrust out, slender with curved and high
instep. He flushed with pride of her--his eyes brightened and he
smiled in the old ironical way, a smile of dare-doing, of victory.

He walked in briskly and with a business-like, forward alertness. She
looked up, paled, then flushed.

"Oh, I was hoping so you had forgotten," she said tremblingly.

He smiled kindly: "I never forget."

She put up one hand to her cheek and rested her head on it a moment
in thought.

He came up and stood deferentially by her side, looking down on her,
on her beautiful head. She half crouched, expecting to hear something
banteringly complimentary; bold, commonplace--to feel even the touch
of his sensual hand on her hair, on her cheek and _My Queen--my
Queen!_

After a while she looked up, surprised. The excitement in her
eyes--the half-doubting--half-yielding fight there, of ambition, and
doubt, and the stubborn wrong of it all, of her hard lot and bitter
life, of the hidden splendor that might lie beyond, and yet the
terrible doubt, the fe