g and their abysmal ignorance, but you know
that their blood is the most undiluted and purest American blood in
America. You know that their children grow up illiterate only because
they have no alternative. You know that those people are wild, lawless,
but, thank God, generous to a fault, and as honest as the sun is
bright. You know that even in their law-breaking they don't follow a
base criminality so much as a perverted code of ethics. I was one of
them. I inherited their blood-hatreds and their squalor, and because of
generous friends I was rescued. If I am worth the effort spent on me at
all, I owe it to those men, who saved me from what I might have been, to
do my utmost for my 'wild sheep.'"

The girl was counting the iridescent threads of the spider's web, but
her eyes caught the fixity with which his hand had unconsciously
clenched itself. All that he said was undoubtedly true and creditable.
She would not, in theory, have had him feel or speak otherwise, yet,
since it is as impossible to eliminate one's ego from thought as to see
through one's reflection in a mirror, she felt suddenly sick at heart.

If the effect of his liberation from the squalid things of his origin
meant, after all, only to bind him the more strongly to them; if a
quixotic sense of obligation barred him from the broader world he had
won to, wherein lay the virtue of salvation? She loved the majestic
wildness of the hills and the sweep of their free winds, but of the
people in general she had thought as one gently bred and nurtured might
naturally think of the less fortunate and more vulgar of the world.

Then she heard his words going on again but seeming to sound from a
distance:

"Except for what generous friends did for me, I might--I would in all
probability have grown as rank and wild as many other boys up there. The
feud would perhaps have claimed me. For human life and human rights, I
might have had the same contempt, and instead of standing here free and
fortunate I might even now be wearing stripes in the penitentiary. If
I've escaped, I think my people are entitled to what little I can offer
them."

Anne felt a weight of foreboding on her heart, but she laid her hands on
his shoulders. "Of course, dear," she said softly, "it's not just
getting to the place, after all, is it? One must travel the right road,
too."

* * * * *

On the deck-rail of a coast-wise fruit steamer beating down from
e