any was prospering, how his egg beater was going,
and asked after Lila's health, omitting mention of the Judge with an
easy nonchalance which struck terror to the woman's heart--terror, lest
the Captain and through him all men should know of her trouble.

But deeper than the terror in her heart at what the Captain might know
and tell was the pain at the thing she knew herself--that the home which
she loved was dead. However proudly it might stand before the world, for
the passing hour or day or year, she knew, and the knowledge sickened
her to her soul's death, that the home was doomed. She kept thinking of
it as a tree, whose roots were cut; a tree whose leaves were still
green, whose comeliness still pleased the eye but whose ugly, withered
branches soon must stand out to affront the world. And sorrowing for the
beauty that was doomed she went to her work. All night with her father
she ministered to the tortured man, but in the morning she slipped away
to her home again hoping her numb vain hope, through another weary
journey of the sun.

The third night found Grant Adams restless, wakeful, anxious to talk.
The opiates had left him. She saw that he was fully himself, even though
conscious of his tortured body. "Laura," he cried in a sick man's feeble
voice, "I want to tell you something."

"Not now, Grant," she returned quietly. "I'd rather hear it to-morrow."

"No," he returned stubbornly, "I want to tell you now."

He paused as if to catch his breath. "For I want you to know I'm the
happiest man in the world." He set his teeth firmly. The muscles of his
jaw worked, and he smiled up at her. He questioned her with his blue
eyes, and after some assent had come into her face--or he thought it
had, he went on:

"There's a God in Israel, Laura--I know it way down in me and all
through me."

A crash of pain stopped him. He grinned at the groan, which the pain
wrenched from him, and whispered, "There's a God in Israel--for He gave
me my chance. I saw the great white killing thing coming to do for Denny
Hogan. How I'd waited for that chance. Then when it came, I wanted to
run. But I didn't run. There's something in you bigger than fear. So
when God gave me my chance He put the--the--the--" pain wrenched him
again, and he said weakly, "the--I've got to say it, you'll
understand--He put the--the guts in me to take it."

When she left him a few minutes later he seemed to be asleep. But when
Doctor Nesbit came into the