e Helen's name, and say they had run off with her.

"Who?"--shouted Conway, his heart stopping in the staggering shock of
it.

The old woman tried to tell Jud Carpenter's tale, and Conway heard
enough. He did not wait to hear it all--he did not know the mill was
now slowly burning.

"Take care of Lily"--he said, as he went into his room and came out
with his pistol buckled around his waist.

Then he mounted his horse and rode swiftly to Millwood.

He was astonished to find a fire in the hearth, a lamp burning, and
one of Helen's gloves lying on the table.

By it was another pair. He picked them up and looked closely. Within,
in red ink, were the initials: _R. T._

He bit his lips till the blood came. He bowed his head in his hands.

Sometimes there comes to us that peculiar mental condition in which
we are vaguely conscious that once before we have been in the same
place, amid the same conditions and surroundings which now confront
us. We seem to be living again a brief moment of our past life, where
Time himself has turned back everything. It came that instant to
Edward Conway.

"It was here--and what was it? Oh, yes:--'Some men repent to God's
smile, some to His frown, and some to His fist?'"--He groaned:--"This
is His fist. Never--never before in all the history of the Conway
family has one of its women--"

He sat down on the old sofa and buried, again, his face in his hands.

Edward Conway was sober, but he still had the instincts of the
drunkard--it never occurred to him that he had done anything to cause
it. Drunkenness was nothing--a weakness--a fault which was now behind
him. But this--this--the first of all the Conway women--and his
daughter--his child--the _beautiful one_. He sat still, and then he
grew very calm. It was the calmness of the old Conway spirit
returning. "Richard Travis," he said to himself, "knows as well what
this act of his means in the South,--in the unwritten law of our
land--as I do. He has taken his chance of life or death. I'll see
that it is death. This is the last of me and my house. But in the
fall I'll see that this Philistine of Philistines dies under its
ruins."

He arose and started out. He saw the lap robe in the hall, and this
put him to investigating. The mares and buggy he found under the
shed. It was all a mystery to him, but of one thing he was sure: "He
will soon come back for them. I can wait."

Choosing a spot in the shadow of a great tree, he sat down wi