Then Mahala stepped back. She said quietly: “I’ve always tried to treat you kindly, Junior. I’ve always hoped that you might see what it was in your power to become, and change your ways. But you never have. You don’t see even now where you’re wrong. You don’t understand now why I’d die, and let my father and mother die with me, before I’d marry you and bring little children, who would be like you, into the world. I loathe the kind of man your father has deliberately made of you. I’d rather see all of us dead than to see us forced into the power of your horrible father!” Inside the window that verdict struck Mahlon Spellman straight to the heart. Both of his hands were clutched into his aching breast as he slid forward across the chair beside which he was standing. CHAPTER XII “THOSE WHO SERVE” Outside, Junior Moreland’s inherent cruelty asserted itself. His face was transformed by anger and astonishment. His fists were clenched and his face distorted as he cried to Mahala: “All right! If you refuse to marry me, it won’t be many days before you’ll be kneeling to my father imploring him for mercy!” Possessed of spirit far above his own, Mahala laughed at him tauntingly. “How perfectly true you are to your teachings and environment!” she said. “Why put the dirty work on your father? Why don’t you say that you’ll force me to kneel to you and implore your mercy? Your words and the look on your face this minute prove conclusively the thing I’ve always, deep down in my heart, known about you. Won’t you have the decency to go?” Mahala stood still, watching Junior down the walk and through the gate, and as he went, dimly she visioned beside him the wraith of the girl she always had been. She lifted her hands and looked at them questioningly. She had made her boasts as to what she could do with them. She thoroughly understood that by the time Junior could reach his father and confide in him, her hour would have come. Again she looked back at her hands, small, delicately shaped, soft and white as a child’s. Unconsciously, she opened and closed them and stretched out her arms to test her strength; then she turned to the door. On entering the living room, she saw her father, whom she had forgotten in the excitement of her meeting with Junior. Rushing to him, she tried to lift his head, to change his position. One glance at the window told her that he had awakened and had heard. She ran her hands over his set face, then slipped them under his vest to the region of his heart, and to her horror, found that it was still. Then she lost self-control and screamed wildly, and this brought her mother and Jemima, who rushed about summoning help and sending for a doctor.