reflected over past years. Had he not wanted such trust--had
he not invited it?

For twenty years no happiness had come to Wade in any sense comparable
to that now secretly his, as he lived near Columbine Belllounds,
divining more and more each day how truly she was his own flesh and the
image of the girl he had loved and married and wronged. Columbine was
his daughter. He saw himself in her. And Columbine, from being strongly
attracted to him and trusting in him and relying upon him, had come to
love him. That was the most beautiful and terrible fact of his
life--beautiful because it brought back the past, her babyhood, and his
barren years, and gave him this sudden change, where he lived
transported with the sense and the joy of his possession. It was
terrible because she was unhappy, because she was chained to duty and
honor, because ruin faced her, and lastly because Wade began to have the
vague, gloomy intimations of distant tragedy. Far off, like a cloud on
the horizon, but there! Long ago he had learned the uselessness of
fighting his morbid visitations. But he clung to hope, to faith in life,
to the victory of the virtuous, to the defeat of evil. A thousand proofs
had strengthened him in that clinging.

There were personal dread and poignant pain for Wade in Columbine
Belllounds's situation. After all, he had only his subtle and intuitive
assurance that matters would turn out well for her in the end. To trust
that now, when the shadow began to creep over his own daughter, seemed
unwise--a juggling with chance.

"I'm beginnin' to feel that I couldn't let her marry that Buster Jack,"
soliloquized Wade, as he rode along the grassy trail. "Fust off, seein'
how strong was her sense of duty an' loyalty, I wasn't so set against
it. But somethin's growin' in me. Her love for that crippled boy, now,
an' his for her! Lord! they're so young an' life must be so hot an' love
so sweet! I reckon that's why I couldn't let her marry Jack.... But, on
the other hand, there's the old man's faith in his son, an' there's
Collie's faith in herself an' in life. Now I believe in that. An' the
years have proved to me there's hope for the worst of men.... I haven't
even had a talk with this Buster Jack. I don't know him, except by
hearsay. An' I'm sure prejudiced, which's no wonder, considerin' where I
saw him in Denver.... I reckon, before I go any farther, I'd better meet
this Belllounds boy an' see what's in him."

*