"My child, I must go out of your life--go--and stay. I see--I see--and I only make you wretched. And I have no right to. It is ignoble. It is I who should bear this burden of sorrow--not you. You who have never sinned, who are so young and so beautiful. In time you will love a nobler man--Clay--" She looked at him, but said nothing. She knew for the first time the solution of her love's problem. She was silent, holding his hand. "Child," he said again. "Helen, you must do as I say. There is happiness for you yet when I am gone--when I am out of your life and the memory and the pain of it cease. Then you will marry Clay--" "Do you really think so? Oh, and he has loved me so and is so splendid and true." Travis was silent, waiting. "Now let me go," she said--"let me forget all my madness and folly in learning to love one whose love was made for mine. In time I shall love him as he deserves. Good-bye." Then she broke impulsively away, and he watched her walk back through the shadows and under the clouds. At the turning of the path across the meadow, he saw another shadow join her. It was Clay, and the two went through the twilight together. Travis turned. "It is right--it is the solution--he alone deserves her. I must reap my past, reap it and see my harvest blighted and bound with rotten twine. But, oh, to know it when it is too late--to know that I might love her and could be happy--then to have to give it up--now--now--when I need it most. The Deed," he said--"we are the deed of all we think and feel." CHAPTER XXVI THE MODEL MILL The discovery of coal and iron made both the old Bishop and Westmoreland rich. Captain Tom sent James Travis to West Point and Archie B. to Annapolis, and their records were worthy of their names. And now, five years after the great fire, there might be seen in Cottontown, besides two furnaces, whose blazing turrets lighted the valley with Prosperity's torch--another cotton mill, erected by the old Bishop. Long and earnestly he thought on the subject before building the mill. Indeed, he first prayed over it and then preached on the subject, and this is the sermon he preached to his people the Sunday before he began the erection of The Model Cotton Mill: "Now, it's this way, my brethren: God made cotton for a mill. You can't get aroun' that; and the mill is to give people wuck an' this wuck is to clothe the worl'. That's all plain an' all good, because it's from God. Man made the bad of it--child labor, and overwuck and poor pay and the terrible everlastin' grind and foul air an' dirt an' squaller an' death.