"Well," went on Jud, "you'd better take her now--while the whole thing has played into yo' hands; but she--the oldes' gyrl--she don't know the ole 'oman's come back an' made her a home; that her father is sober an' there with her little sister, that Clay is away an' ain't deserted her. She don't know anything, an' when you set her out in that empty house, deserted, her folks all deserted her, as she'll think, don't you know she'll go to the end of the worl' with you?" "Well?" asked Travis as he smiled calmly. "Well, take her and thank Jud Carpenter for the Queen of the Valley--eh?" and he laughed and tried to nudge Travis familiarly, but the latter moved away. "I'll take her," at last he said. "She'll go to The Gaffs with you"--went on Jud. "There she's safe. Then to-night you can drive her to the train at Lenox, as we told Biggers." He came over and whispered in Travis's ear. "That worked out beautifully," said Travis after a while, "but I'll not trust her to you or to Charley Biggers. I'll take her myself--she's mine--Richard Travis's--mine--mine! I who have been buffeted and abused by Fate, given all on earth I do not want, and denied the one thing I'd die for; I'll show them who they are up against. I'll take her, and they may talk and rave and shoot and be damned!" His old bitterness was returning. His face flushed: "That's the way you love to hear me talk, isn't it--to go on and say I'll take her and do as I please with her, and if it pleases me to marry her I'll set her up over them all--heh?" Jud nodded. "That's one of me," said Travis--"the old one. This is the new." And he opened the back of his watch where a tiny lock of Alice Westmore's auburn hair lay: "Oh, if I were only worthy to kiss it!" He walked into the mill and down to the little room where Helen sat. He stood a while at the door and watched her--the poise of the beautiful head, the cheeks flushed with the good working blood that now flowed through them, the hair falling with slight disorder, a stray lock of it dashed across her forehead and setting off the rest of it, darker and deeper, as a cloudlet, inlaid with gold, the sunset of her cheeks. His were the eyes of a connoisseur when it came to women, and as he looked he knew that every line of her was faultless; the hands slender and beautifully high-born; the fingers tapering with that artistic slope of the tips, all so plainly visible now that they were at work. One foot was thrust out, slender with curved and high instep. He flushed with pride of her--his eyes brightened and he smiled in the old ironical way, a smile of dare-doing, of victory. He walked in briskly and with a business-like, forward alertness. She looked up, paled, then flushed. "Oh, I was hoping so you had forgotten," she said tremblingly. He smiled kindly: "I never forget." She put up one hand to her cheek and rested her head on it a moment in thought.