ee the side-face of the doctor, its saturnine grimness
strangely moved, and beyond him, Shirley and her mother. Many glanced at
them, for the major's will had been opened that morning and few there
had been surprised to learn that, save for a life-annuity for old
Jereboam, he had left everything he possessed to Shirley. Miss Mattie
Sue was beside them, and between, wan with weeping, sat Rickey Snyder.
Shirley's arm lay shelteringly about the small shoulders as if it would
stay the passion of grief that from time to time shook them.

The evening before had been further darkened by the child's
disappearance and Miss Mattie Sue had sat through half the night in
tearful anxiety. It was Valiant who had solved the riddle. In her first
wild compunction, Rickey had gasped out the story of her meeting with
Greef King, his threat and her own terrorized silence, and when he heard
of this he had guessed her whereabouts. He had found her at the Dome, in
the deserted cabin from which on a snowy night six years ago, Shirley
had rescued her. She had fled there in her shabbiest dress, her toys and
trinkets left behind, taking with her only a string of blue glass beads
that had been Shirley's last Christmas present.

"Let me stay!" she had wailed. "I'm not fit to live down there! It's all
my fault that it happened. I was a coward. I ought to stay here in
Hell's-Half-Acre forever and ever!" Valiant had carried her back in his
arms down the mountain--she had been too spent to walk.

He thought of this now as he saw that arm about the child in that
protective, almost motherly gesture. It made his own heartache more
unbearable. Such a little time ago he had felt that arm about _him_!

He leaned his hot head against the cool plastered wall, trying to keep
his mind on the solemn reading. But Shirley's voice and laugh seemed to
be running eerily through the chanting lines, and her face shut out
pulpit and lectern. It swept over him suddenly that each abominable hour
could but make the situation more impossible for them both. He had seen
her as she entered the church, had thought her even paler than in the
wood, the bluish shadows deeper under her eyes. Those delicate charms
were in eclipse.

And it was he who was to blame!

It came to him with a stab of enlightenment. He had been thinking only
of himself all the while. But for her, it was his presence that had now
become the unbearable thing. A cold sweat broke on his forehead. "...
for I