She was perched aloft on a little peak of rock a few yards away. The boy lay along the slope of it, clinging to her right hand. There was reverence in his manner. She was sacred to him and he to her in the religion of young love. Her left hand held the book she had spoken of. It rested like a harp on the wave of her thigh. Her feet were bare, though the air was cold; they were shapely feet. She was shapely everywhere, and there was a primeval grace, a loveliness about her every outline. Womanhood was disclosing its growth and its spell, straining at the scant and shabby dress and enveloping her in beauty like a drapery of mist. She might have been indeed the nymph of this pool, luring a faun to his death in a fatal element. But to RoBards the life-fearing little pauper had the terrifying power of a Lorelei throned on a storm-beaten cliff and chanting his hapless son to shipwreck. He wondered if the Lashers were not making ready to wreak upon his boy a roundabout revenge for what he had done to theirs. He was mortally afraid of this ragged girl. And there was nothing to tell him of the tremendous forces that were gathering to overwhelm this calamity with a greater. CHAPTER XLIII Afraid to intervene in this idyl; ashamed of the un-American snobbery that made him wince at the prospect of a Lasher for a daughter-in-law; aghast at the thought of having to ruin Aletta’s life after secretly taking her brother’s life; and humbled by the praise he had overheard her give him, RoBards was in the doldrums of uncertainty. He could not declare himself to the two lovesick children. He could not challenge them to a debate on the rights of youth to romance. He slunk from the field, glad only of being able to sneak away uncaught. As he hurried down the hill home to lay the problem before Patty, the nearer he drew to her, the more clearly he foresaw that she would be less of a help in its solution than herself a new complication. She had suffered bitterly from Immy’s marriage to Chalender. The son growing up should have been a support; but Junior was bound to be an increasing burden. No, he must not tell Patty what he had learned. But he wanted to be near her in his own misery, and when he could not find her downstairs he went up to her room. She was so profoundly a-brood over some evident despair that she did not hear him push back the door, slightly ajar. He stood on the sill and studied her with the utter regret and impotency of a lover who cannot buy or fetch new beauty for the old beauty of his sweet, nor stay the waning of her radiance. As vainly as a girl muses upon her outgrown dolls; as vainly as Dido wished her love to come again to Carthage—Patty was scanning the fineries she had taken pride in up to the doomsday when her daughter married her own former lover.