"I do not blame you," he said. "I shall be a--father to you if you will let me." He pressed her hand, and raising his hat, was gone. As he drove away he turned and looked at her slipping across the lawn in the twilight. In his eyes was a look of triumphant excitement. "To own her--such a creature--God--it were worth risking my neck." The mention of Harry brought back all her bitter recklessness to Helen. She was but a child and her road, indeed, was hard. And as she turned at the old gate and looked back at the vanishing buggy she said: "Had he asked me this evening I'd--yes--I'd go to the end of the world with him. I'd go--go--go--and I care not how." Richard Travis was in a jolly mood at the supper table that night, and Harry became jolly also, impertinently so. He had not said a word about his cousin being with Helen, but it burned in his breast, and he awaited his chance to mention it. "I have thought up a fable since I have been at supper, Cousin Richard. Shall I tell you?" "Oh"--with a cynical smile--"do!" "Well," began Harry unabashed, and with many sly winks and much histrionic effort, "it is called the 'Fox and the Lion.' Now a fox in the pursuit ran down a beautiful young doe and was about to devour her when the lion came up and with a roar and a sweep of his paw, took her saying...." "'Get out of the way, you whelp,'" said his cousin, carrying the fable on, "for I perceive you are not even a fox, but a coyote, since no fox was ever known to run down a doe." The smile was gradually changed on his face to a cruel sneer, and Harry ceased talking with a suddenness that was marked. CHAPTER XVII THE WHIPPER-IN When the mill opened the next day, there was work for Jud Carpenter. He came in and approached the superintendent's desk briskly. "Well, suh, hu' many to-day?" he asked. Kingsley looked over his list of absentees. "Four, and two of them spinners. Carpenter, you must go at once and see about it. They are playing off, I am sure." "Lem'me see the list, suh,"--and he ran his eye over the names. "Bud Billings--plague his old crotchety head--. He kno's that machine's got to run, whether no. Narthin's the matter with him--bet a dollar his wife licked him last night an' he's mad about it." "That will do us no good," said Kingsley--"what he is mad about. That machine must be started at once. The others you can see afterwards." Carpenter jerked his slouch hat down over his eyes and went quickly out. In half an hour he was back again. His hat was off, his face was red, his shaggy eyebrows quivered with angry determination, as, with one hand in the collar of the frightened Bud, he pulled the slubber into the superintendent's presence. Following her husband came Mrs. Billings--a small, bony, wiry, black-eyed woman, with a firmly set mouth and a perpetual thunder-cloud on her brow--perhaps the shadow of her coarse, crow-black hair.