om his pocket the little leather note-book
that had been Stanton's, and which contained her letter to him.
With trembling hands he opened it. Again this letter was to mean a
revelation.

General Lodge had said his engineer had read aloud only the first of
that message to Neale; and from this Allison Lee and all the listeners
had formed their impressions.

Neale read these first lines.

"No wonder they imagined I killed her!" he exclaimed. "She accuses me.
But she never meant what they imagined she meant. Why, that evidence
could hang me!... Allie told them she saw Larry do it. And it's
common knowledge now--I've heard it here.... What, then, had Allie to
forgive--to forgive with eyes that will haunt me to my grave?"

Then the truth burst upon him with merciless and stunning force.

"My God! Allie believed what they all believed--what I must have blindly
made seem true!... That I was Beauty Stanton's lover!"

34

The home to which Allie Lee was brought stood in the outskirts of Omaha
upon a wooded bank above the river.

Allie watched the broad, yellow Missouri swirling by. She liked best
to be alone outdoors in the shade of the trees. In the weeks since her
arrival there she had not recovered from the shock of meeting Neale only
to be parted from him.

But the comfort, the luxury of her home, the relief from constant dread,
such as she had known for years, the quiet at night--these had been so
welcome, so saving, that her burden of sorrow seemed endurable. Yet in
time she came to see that the finding of a father and a home had only
added to her bitterness.

Allison Lee's sister, an elderly woman of strong character, resented
the home-bringing of this strange, lost daughter. Allie had found no
sympathy in her. For a while neighbors and friends of the Lees' flocked
to the house and were kind, gracious, attentive to Allie. Then somehow
her story, or part of it, became gossip. Her father, sensitive, cold,
embittered by the past, suffered intolerable shame at the disgrace of a
wife's desertion and a daughter's notoriety. Allie's presence hurt him;
he avoided her as much as possible; the little kindnesses that he had
shown, and his feelings of pride in her beauty and charm, soon vanished.
There was no love between them. Allie had tried hard to care for him,
but her heart seemed to be buried in that vast grave of the West. She
was obedient, dutiful, passive, but she could not care for him. And
there came a da