eply, Well, you have
to suffer, that is all.... Poor Alo! To think that after all
these years, you can strike me!

There is something malicious in the way Mercy Falchion crosses my
path. What she knows, she knows; and what she can do if she
chooses, I must endure. I cannot love Mercy Falchion again, and
that, I suppose, is the last thing she would wish now. I cannot
bring Alo back. But how does that concern her! Why does she hate
me so? For, underneath her kindest words,--and they are kind
sometimes,--I can detect the note of enmity, of calculating scorn.
... I wish I could go to Ruth and tell her all, and ask her to
decide if she can take a man with such a past.... What a
thing it is to have had a clean record of unflinching manliness at
one's back!

I add another extract:

Phil's story of Danger Mountain struck like ice at my heart. There
was a horrible irony in the thing: that it should be told to me, of
all the world, and at such a time. Some would say, I suppose, that
it was the arrangement of Providence. Not to speak it profanely, it
seems to be the achievement of the devil. The torture was too
malicious for God....

Phil's letter has gone to his pal at Danger Mountain....

The fourth day after the funeral Justine Caron came to see Galt Roscoe.
This was the substance of their conversation, as I came to know long
afterwards.

"Monsieur," she said, "I have come to pay something of a debt which I
owe to you. It is a long time since you gave my poor Hector burial, but
I have never forgotten, and I have brought you at last--you must not
shake your head so--the money you spent.... But you MUST take it. I
should be miserable if you did not. The money is all that I can repay;
the kindness is for memory and gratitude always."

He looked at her wonderingly, earnestly, she seemed so unworldly,
standing there, her life's ambition not stirring beyond duty to her
dead. If goodness makes beauty, she was beautiful; and yet, besides
all that, she had a warm, absorbing eye, a soft, rounded cheek, and she
carried in her face the light of a cheerful, engaging spirit.

"Will it make you happier if I take the money?" he said at last, and his
voice showed how she had moved him.

"So much happier!" she answered, and she put a roll of notes into his
hand.

"Then I will take it," he replied, with a manner not too serious, and
he looked at the notes carefully; "but on