"Fair, she won't ever let me! She's as good as told me, up and down, I mustn't. And _now_ I can't! I'm penniless, and part of her inheritance will be my lost lands. I can't ignore that; I haven't got the moral courage! Besides, Fair, I know that if she takes you, there's an end of all her troubles and a future worthy of her--as far as any future can be. What sort of a fellow would I be--Oh, mind you! if I had the faintest reason to think she'd rather have me than you, I George! sir----" He sprang up and began to spurn the bark off a stump with a strength of leg that made it fly. "Fair, tell me! Are you going to offer yourself, notwithstanding all?" "Yes. Yes; if the letter I expect from home to-morrow, and which I telegraphed them to write, is what I make no doubt it will be; yes." March gazed at his companion and slowly and soberly smiled. "Fair," he softly exclaimed, "I wish I had your head! Lord! Fair, I wish I had your chance!" "Ah! no," was the gentle reply, "I wish one or the other were far better." * * * * * A third sun had set before Barbara walked again at the edge of the grove. Two or three hours earlier her father had at last come home, and as she saw the awful change in his face and the vindictive gleam with which he met her recognition of it, she knew they were no longer father and daughter. The knowledge pierced like a slow knife, and yet brought a sense of relief--of release--that shamed her until she finally fled into the open air as if from suffocation. There she watched the west grow dark and the stars fill the sky while thoughts shone, vanished, and shone again in soft confusion like the fireflies in the grove. Only one continued--that now she might choose her future. Her father had said so with an icy venom which flashed fire as he added, "But if you quit Rosemont now, so help me God, you shall never own it, if I have to put it to the torch on my dying bed!" She heard something and stepped into hiding. What rider could be coming at this hour? John March? Henry Fair? It was neither. As he passed in at the gate she shrank, gasped, and presently followed. Warily she rose up the front steps, stole to the parlor blinds, and, peering in, saw her father pay five crisp thousand dollar bills to Cornelius Leggett. In her bed Barbara thought out the truth: that Cornelius still held some secret of her father's; that in smaller degree he had been drawing hush money for years; and that he had concluded that any more he could hope to plunder from the blazing ruin of his living treasury must be got quickly, and in one levy, ere it fell. But what that secret might be she strove in vain to divine. One lurking memory, that would neither show its shape nor withdraw its shadow, haunted her ringing brain. The clock struck twelve; then one; then two; and then she slept.