l in desperate strait--belonged to a man with intellect and
energy, for whom she could have near sympathy, a sense of alliance; but
before her eyes was only ridiculous Sam Fetridge, the butt of the
village, vaporing up and down.

"It is true," she said frankly, "that your life in Sevier has been
wretched enough. I thank God that you are going to change it. What can I
do to help you?"

"Don't you know? Don't you understand even yet?" The little man came up
before her and took both her hands in his: the tears stood in his
blinking eyes. Isabel looked into them steadily, and she did not take
her hands away. "You see it is a sort of crisis to-night with me, Miss
Calhoun. I've thought for a good while the game was played out for body
and soul. But there's one thing that could make a man of me again, and
to-night I feel as if I had some right to put out my hand and take it."

Her lips moved, but she said nothing.

"It is your love. I've loved you a long time. I'm old enough to be your
father, but I never loved any woman but you, Isabel."

"I thought you meant that," she said under her breath.

"It is not drunken Sam Fetridge that loves you. I have culture,
intelligence, energy. I am a better man at bottom than Dave Cabarreux,
and one nearer akin to yourself."

"I love him: I do not love you." She said it mechanically, her eyes
fixed on his with a frightened, curious look of recognition. It followed
him as he left her, half staggering across the porch: it was on him
still as he came back, and, leaning against the pillar, held out his
hand again to her.

She did not take it now.

"Miss Calhoun, there is not in the United States a man with more
ambition than I have, nor one with a better chance to take his place
among other men if--if I had your hand to hold. Give it to me: be my
wife. For God's sake, don't take the chance from me!"

"Major Fetridge," she said resolutely, but with a strange quaver in her
voice, "I love David Cabarreux. I never can marry you. If there is
anything else that I can do--"

"No, there is nothing you can do," he cried vehemently. "It would have
been better you had thought me a drunken brute like the others, and had
not recognized me. For you did recognize me, you know."

He turned without another word, and walked down the hill with slouching
step and head bent. Isabel tried to think of him as the tippling major,
but it seemed as if she had talked to another man.

* *