MacLeod, his adoring eyes on Nina Ide, had no word to say. The features of Kate Arden, who stared at him with her heart in her eyes, twisted with a promise of bitter tears. This, then, was the girl of Castonia, with whom they had taunted her! "It's only for grudge and money he's goin' to marry you!" persisted Tommy. "May I rest forever in purgatory with no masses for my soul if that ain't the truth!" With the instinct of the animal repulsed, the girl read more in the face of MacLeod than she understood from the declaration of Tommy Eye. She looked from face to face again, but the flame was gone from her eyes. There they stood, the silent, hostile, bitter phalanx from outside--oppressors and scorners. There she stood--alone! And she fell face down upon the ground--the only mother she had ever known--a heart-broken, weary, lonely, sobbing child. Nina Ide reached her before the others moved. Twice the girl fought her way out of her arms. Twice the sympathetic little mother-heart of the Castonia beauty conquered the rebel and retook her, whispering to her eagerly. And she held her tear-streaked face close to her shoulder, and patted the grimy little fingers between which tears were trickling. There was something inexpressibly pathetic even in the unkemptness of the stricken girl, in her torn dress and the brown skin of face and hands, touched here and there by the stain of exposure to the blackened forest. And in her loneliness, feeling for the first time in her life real sympathy from one of her sex, gathering with grateful nostrils the faint perfume that whispered of the refinement and comfort that her heart had sought almost unconsciously and had never found, at last the girl ceased her struggles and clung to her new friend. The waif's true instinct was proving this friend's sincerity more surely than the whispered assurances proved it. And Nina Ide bent to her ear, and murmured: "We will hate him together, poor little girl! He is not a good man to have a girl's love." "When the hysterics are all over," remarked the Honorable Pulaski, sarcastically, "we'll take the young woman off your hands." "You'll not take her off _my_ hands!" retorted Nina, with spirit. "She's going back home with me." "You haven't got any rights over her!" barked Britt. "Perhaps, then, Mr. Barrett is ready to stand up and say what his rights are," suggested Wade, with bitter hint of retaliation in his tones. Barrett, pale with the illness that was seizing him, grew paler yet with anger and terror, for he feared exposure. The Honorable Pulaski picked up the gage of battle with all the alacrity of his irascible nature. "For a dog-fight, that girl will be as good a bone as anything else!" he growled, under his breath. And then he whirled on his heel and bellowed: "Wake up there, MacLeod! If you can't make love to the girl you are goin' to marry, I reckon you can at least fight a little to get her! Call in the crew!"