"Then you"--he turned and said it fondly--reverently--"you should be mine by right of--of love." She sighed. "Clay--I am sorry for you. I can never love you that way. You have told me that, since--oh, since I can remember, and I have always told you--you know we are cousins, anyway--second cousins." She shook her head. "Under the heart of the flinty hill lies the coal," he said simply. But she did not understand him. She had looked down and seen Harry's foot-track on the moss. And so they sat until the first star arose and shimmered through the blue mist which lay around the far off purpling hill tops. Then there was the clang of a dinner bell. "It is Mammy Maria," she said--"I must go. No--you must not walk home with me. I'd rather be alone." She did not intend it, but it was brutal to have said it that way--to the sensitive heart it went to. He looked hurt for a moment and then tried to smile in a weak way. Then he raised his hat gallantly, turned and went off down the gulch. Helen stood looking for the last time on the pretty arbor. Here she had lost her heart--her life. She fell on the moss again and kissed the stone. Then she walked home--in tears. CHAPTER VII HILLARD WATTS It is good for the world now and then to go back to first principles in religion. It would be better for it never to get away from them; but, since it has that way of doing--of breeding away and breaking away from the innate good--it is well that a man should be born in any age with the faith of Abraham. It matters not from what source such a man may spring. And he need have no known pedigree at all, except an honest ancestry behind him. Such a man was Hillard Watts, the Cottontown preacher. Sprung from the common people of the South, he was a most uncommon man, in that he had an absolute faith in God and His justice, and an absolute belief that some redeeming goodness lay in every human being, however depraved he may seem to the world. And so firm was his faith, so simple his religion--so contrary to the worldliness of the religion of his day,--that the very practice of it made him an uncommon man. As the overseer of General Jeremiah Travis's large estate before the war, he proved by his success that even slaves work better for kindness. Of infinite good sense, but little education, he had a mind that went to the heart of things, and years ago the fame of his homely but pithy sayings stuck in the community. In connection with kindness to his negroes one of his sayings was, "Oh, kindness can't be classified--it takes in the whole world or nothin'." When General Travis got into dire financial straits once, he sent for his overseer, and advised with him as to the expediency of giving up. The overseer, who knew the world and its ways with all the good judgment of his nature, dryly remarked: "That'll never do. Never let the world know you've quit; an' let the undertaker that buries you be the fust man to find out you're busted."