Judith drew her hand away with finality, but her eyes were full of pitying kindness. She knew now what she had done to this man. By the revealing lamp of her own suffering she read his. Back in the old days she had counted him only one more triumph in her maiden progress. "No," she said gravely, "I ain't studyin' about marryin' anybody. I'm mighty sorry that I done thataway. I'm sorry, and ashamed; but I have to say no again, Elder Drane. There ain't never goin' to be no other answer." "Hit's that feller Bonbright," declared the elder sternly as he stood aside to let her pass. "Good Lord, why ain't the man got sense enough to come back and claim his own!" Chapter XXII Ebb-Tide Life closed in on Judith after that with an iron hand. She missed sorely the children's demands upon her, their play and prattle and movement about the place. Huldah was gone. Wade was gone. She could get no news of Creed. The things to love and hate and be jealous of seemed to have dropped out of her existence, so that the heart recoiled upon itself, the spirit wrestled blindly in darkness with an angel which was but its own self in other guise. Day by day she turned from side to side for an exit from the fiery path she trod, and cried out to Heaven that she could not bear it--she could not stand it--there must be some way other than this! The Lusk girls and the Turrentine twins were to have a double wedding. The preparations for this event were torture to Judith. Everybody, it seemed, could be happy but her own poor self. Even the fact that Jeff and Andy were changed, kinder to her, more considerate, better men in every way, had its own sting. If this could have been so before, the wreck of her world need not have come about. Blatch kept rigorously to his own side of the Gulch, yet once in a while Judith met him on the highroad; and then, while he approached her with the carefullest efforts toward pleasing, he showed the effects of anxiety, the hard life, and the fact that he had begun to drink heavily--a thing he had never done before. Spring would terminate his lease of the Turrentine farm, and then he must seek other quarters for his illicit traffic. His situation was doubled in danger by the fact that it could not be disguised how his uncle had turned upon him. Now that one did not, supposably, incur the displeasure of the Turrentines by giving information concerning Blatch and his still, the enterprise was a much safer one, and he trembled in hourly terror of its being undertaken by some needy soul. This terror gave a certain ferocity to his manner. Also the man who had come in with him to take Jim Cal's place in the partnership was a more undesirable associate even than Buck Shalliday.