ew wheel was set up, and turned with bayonets. The mobs were
overawed and the ranks of the army were refilled.

CHAPTER XXXI

BETWEEN THE LINES

Betty Winter found to her sorrow that the memory of a dead love could be
a troublesome thing. Ned Vaughan's tender and compelling passion had
been resistless in the moonlight beneath a fragrant apple tree with the
old mill wheel splashing its music at their feet. She had returned to
her cot in the hospital that night in a glow of quiet, peaceful joy.
Life's problem had been solved at last in the sweet peace of a tender
and beautiful spiritual love--the only love that could be real.

All this was plain, while the glow of Ned's words were in her heart and
the memory of his nearness alive in the fingers and lips he had kissed.
And then to her terror came stealing back the torturing vision of his
brother. Why, why, why could she never shut out the memory of this man!

Over and over again she repeated the angry final word:

"He isn't worth a moment's thought!"

And yet she kept on thinking, thinking, always in the same blind circle.
At last came the new resolution,

"Worthy or unworthy, I've given my word to a better man and that settles
it."

The fight had become in her inflamed imagination the struggle between
good and evil. The younger man with his chivalrous boyish ideals was
God, Love, Light. The older with his iron will, his fierce ungovernable
passion, was the Devil, Lust and Darkness. She trembled with new terror
at the discovery that there was something elemental deep within her own
life that answered the challenge of this older voice with a strange
joyous daring.

She had just risen from her knees where she had prayed for strength to
fight and win this battle when the maid knocked on her door. She had
left the hospital and returned home for a week's rest, tottering on the
verge of a nervous collapse since her return from the meeting with Ned.

"A letter, Miss Betty," the maid said with a smile.

She tore the envelope with nervous dread. It bore no postmark and was
addressed in a strange hand.

Inside was another envelope in Ned's handwriting, and around it a sheet
of paper on which was scrawled,

"DEAR MISS WINTER: The bearer of this letter is a trusted spy of
both Governments. I have friends in Washington and in Richmond. In
Richmond I am supposed to betray the Washington Government. In
Washington it is known that I am at heart