The next day they bade good-bye to the sturdy soldiers of the cross who had been so true to them, and started on their westward journey. Dick saw Amy safe in her new home, and then with a promise that she would write to him regularly, and an agreement that he would send her letters and papers addressed to the people with whom she lived, he left her; satisfied that she was in kind hands, and that a new life was open before her. But when Dick was once more aboard the train, alone with his thoughts, without the anxiety for Amy's immediate welfare upon his mind, the struggle of his life began. He loved Amy dearly; had loved her almost from the moment she came into George Udell's printing office three years ago; loved her in spite of the difference in their position, when he was only a tramp and she was the favored daughter of wealth; when he was an unbeliever and she was a worker in the church; loved her when he saw her losing her hold on the higher life and drifting with the current; loved her when she left home, and as he thought, honor behind. And he was forced to confess, in his own heart, that he loved her yet, in spite of the fact that their positions were reversed; that he was an honored gentleman, respected and trusted by all, while she, in the eyes of the world, was a fallen woman with no friend but himself. But what of the future? Dick's dreams had always been that he would win such a position in the world as would enable him, with confidence, to ask her to share his life. But always there had been the feeling that he never could be worthy. And with the dark picture of his own past before him, he knew he had no right to think of her as his wife. But now there was no question as to his position. But what of hers? Could he think of taking for a wife, one whom he had seen in that house at Cleveland? On the one hand, his love plead for her; on the other, the horror of her life argued against it. Again his sense of justice plead, and his own life came before him like a horrid vision as it had done that morning when he learned of his father's death. He saw his childhood home, smelt the odor of the fragrant pines upon the hills, and heard the murmur of the river running past the cabin. Again he heard his drunken father cursing in his sleep, and caught the whisper of his mother's dying prayer; and again he crept stealthily out of the cabin into the glory of the morning, with a lean hound his only companion.