us period before the crash of '93. With
this check in his pocket he went home--for the first time in two weeks.

It was well beyond the Woodlawn dinner-hour before he could muster up
the courage to cross the lawns to Deer Trace. No word had passed between
him and Ardea since the September afternoon when he had overtaken her at
the church door,--counting as nothing the effort she had made to speak
to him on the night of vengeance.

How would she receive him? Not too coldly, he hoped. It was known that
Vincent's assailant in the furnace yard was a stranger; a man who had
taken service as a guard: also that Mr. Gordon--they gave him his
courtesy title now--had saved Vincent from a terrible death. Tom thought
the rescue should count for something with Ardea.

It did. She was sitting at the piano in the otherwise deserted
music-room when he entered; and she broke a chord in the middle to give
him both of her hands, and to say, with eyes shining, as if the rescue
were a thing of yesterday:

"O Tom! I _knew_ you had it in you! It was fine!"

"Hold on," he said, a bit unsteadily. "There must be no more
misunderstandings. What happened that night three weeks ago, had to
happen; and five minutes before it happened I was wondering if I could
aim straight enough in the light from the slag-pot to hit him. And I
fully meant to do it."

She shuddered.

"I--I was afraid," she faltered. "I knew, you know--Japheth had told
me, in--in justice to you. That was why I ran across the lawn and called
to you."

The sweet beauty of her laid hold on him and he felt his grip going.
Another word and he would be trespassing again. To keep from saying it
he crossed to the recessed window and sat down in the sleepy-hollow
chair which was the Major's peculiar possession in the music-room.

After a little he said: "Play something, won't you?--something that will
make me a little less sorry that I didn't kill him."

"The idea!" she said. But when he settled himself in the big easy-chair
as a listener, lying back with his eyes closed and his hands locked over
one knee, she turned to the piano and humored him. When the final chord
of the _Wanderlied_ had sung itself asleep, he sat up and nodded
approvingly.

"I wonder if you appreciate your gift as you should?--to be able to make
a man over in the moral part of him with the tips of your fingers? The
devil is exorcised, for the moment, and I can tell you all about it now,
if you care to know."