"I am not afraid of your deceiving me, Lem--you have never lied to me in the past, and I'll trust you-all in the future. I mean to lift you up," she went on earnestly,--"to show you a worthy goal that I know is thah awaiting your acknowledgment. As I have said over and over, Lem, I do not expect you to understand it all now, but I hoped that you would believe me, who have gone through it all with its blighting misery. Your whole life is now and always will be made furtive and fear-ridden, while you cling to this blood-dogma of revenge--always looking for the blood of your enemies, and when at last you get that blood and delude yourself into the thought that you are satisfied, you find springing out of that very act other enemies waiting in your path. It is an endless chain of fight and flight and blood that is harrowing. I saw an example of it yesterday before my very eyes, because I know you would have killed Sap McGill had I not been thah. It is all fundamentally wicked. Oh, Lem! It is all hideously wrong. Now that I am rid of that awful sting, I cannot and will not link my life to one who harbors these awful things to drag us both down. "Won't you put this life behind you, Lem, and come down where God has granted a paradise--a paradise of peace? Down where nature has unfurled a grassy, level land and men walk in the open and can see each other's faces? Down thah, Lem, where hearts beat uncontaminated beyond the maelstrom of feudal hate, and where all men are brothers--down in the land of hope--hope that makes a song of life--in the land of hope, Lem,--a cloudless, sunshiny fairy world--where dreams come true? "You said you would love to go to Lexington to my grandfather, but you won't leave the mountains until you have killed the revenuer and Sap McGill. Is that evidence that you love me, Lem? To-morrow morning I'll ride Rajah back alone. I don't believe that you love me, Lem--I can't believe it----" Lem got to his feet. He was very white in the moonlight now. He picked up a stick off the ground. He rested the butt of his rifle against the block and, placing the muzzle of the gun against his breast, he reached down and touched the trigger with the end of the stick before Belle-Ann realized what he was up to. "Belle-Ann, say that I don't love yo' agin an' I'll blow my heart out." Gently and quickly she took the stick out of his hand in alarm. "Lem, there is a way out for you--there is a sustaining power that will help you, if you will only have faith," she pleaded. "'Know ye the truth and the truth shall make ye free.'" "But he kilt my old pap,--an' my good old maw, Belle-Ann. I'd alers heer their spirits a cryin' ef I went away an' didn't git th' revenuer's blood," he protested for the twentieth time. "An' didn't McGill try t' kill me jest yisterday?"