he good of the State."

"That's true. His family is left in bad shape--"

Cavanagh broke off the conversation suddenly. "I must go back to--" he had
almost said "back to Wetherford." "My patient needs me!" he exclaimed.

"How does he seem?"

"He's surely dying. In my judgment he can't last the night, but so long as
he's conscious it's up to me to be on the spot."

Redfield walked slowly back across the river, thinking on the patient
courage of the ranger.

"It isn't the obvious kind of thing, but it's courage all the same," he
said to himself.

Meanwhile Lize and Virginia, left alone beside the fire, had drawn closer
together.

The girl's face, so sweet and so pensive, wrought strongly upon the older
woman's sympathy. Something of her own girlhood came back to her. Being
freed from the town and all its associations, she became more considerate,
more thoughtful. She wished to speak, and yet she found it very hard to
begin. At last she said, with a touch of mockery in her tone: "You like
Ross Cavanagh almost as well as I do myself, don't you?"

The girl flushed a little, but her eyes remained steady. "I would not be
here if I did not," she replied.

"Neither would I. Well, now, I have got something to tell you--something I
ought to have told you long ago--something that Ross ought to know. I
intended to tell you that first day you came back, but I couldn't somehow
get to it, and I kept putting it off and putting it off till--well, then I
got fond of you, and every day made it harder." Here she made her supreme
effort. "Child, I'm an old bluff. I'm not your mother at all."

Lee stared at her in amazement. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"I mean your real mother died when you was a tiny little babe. You see, I
was your father's second wife; in fact, you weren't a year old when we
married. Ed made me promise never to let you know. We were to bring you up
just the same as if you was a child to both of us. Nobody knows but Reddy.
I told him the day we started up here."

The girl's mind ran swiftly over the past as she listened. The truth of
the revelation reached her instantly, explaining a hundred strange things
which had puzzled her all her life. The absence of deep affection between
herself and Lize was explained. Their difference in habit, temperament,
thought--all became plain. "But my mother!" she said, at last. "Who _was_
my mother?"

"I never saw her. You see, Ed came into the country bringing you, a li