One day she rebelled against the painful, almost morbid, state of indecision that was on her and firmly decided that there was but one honorable course to pursue and that was in every way to be true to her tacit promise to the absent suitor, and in a spasm of resolution she was about to set herself to the correspondence just mentioned when Mam' Linda was announced. The old woman had just returned from a visit to Chattanooga to see her son and in addition to news of his well-being she had many other things to say. The letters would have to wait, Helen told herself, and her old nurse was admitted. Linda remained two hours, and Helen sat the while in a veritable dream as the old woman gave Pete's version of Carson Dwight's conduct before the mob on the lonely mountain road. And when Linda had gone, Helen turned to her desk. There lay the white sheets fluttering in the summer breeze, mutely beckoning her back to stem reality. Helen stared at them and then with a little cry of pain she lowered her head to her folded arms and wept--not for Sanders in his complacent, epistolary hopefulness, but for the one who had bravely borne more than his burden of pain, and upon whom she had resolved to put still more. Helen told herself that it would not be the first time _ideal_ happiness had not been a factor in a sensible marriage. The time would come, in her life, as it had in the lives of so many other women, when she would look back on her present feeling for Carson, and wonder how she ever could have fancied--but, no, that would be unfair to him, to his wealth of spirituality, to his gentleness, his courage to--to Carson _just as he was_, to Carson who must always, always be the same, different from all living men. Yes, he was to go out of her life. Out of her life--how strange! and yet it would be so, for she would be the _wife_ of---- She shuddered and sat staring at the floor. CHAPTER XXXVI. [Illustration: 9319] IGGIN was no insignificant opponent; he held weapons as powerful as fire applied to inflammable material. The papers were filled with accounts of race rioting in all parts of the South, and in his speeches on the stump, through the length and breadth of the county, he kept his particular version of the bloody happenings well before his hearers. “This is a white man's country,” was the key-note of all his hot tirades, “and the white man is bound to rule.” He accomplished one master-stroke. There was to be a considerable gathering of the Confederate, veterans at an annual picnic at Shell Valley, a few miles from Springtown, and by no mean diplomacy Wiggin had, by shrewdly ingratiating himself into the good graces of the committee of arrangements, managed to have himself invited as the only orator of the occasion. He meant to make it the greatest day of the campaign, and in some respects, as will be seen he did.