"I wonder if he 'd mind if I called him a 'young un,' soliloquized the attacking giant. Then he pulled the baby's leg. "When he grows up, tell him I was the first man to pull his leg. My word, he has n't a bone in his body, not even a tooth."

"Silly!" said Clem. "Of course not." Collingeford spent a good deal of his week at the Firs. Clem went to see the baby daily as a matter of course, and he went along, as he said himself, as another matter of course. Clem talked to the baby, Collingeford to Alix. He said to her one day:

"I've read in books about babies doing this sort of thing to gadabouts-"

"Gadabouts," interrupted Alix, "is just, but cruel."

"Well, butterflies," compromised Collingeford. "But I never believed it really happened."

"Oh," said Alix, "it was n't the baby -not altogether. You see, Mr. Collingeford, Gerry Lansing-I'm Mrs. Gerrydisappeared over a year ago-before the baby came. He thought I did n't love. him. I might as well tell you all about it. I believe in telling things. Mystery is always more dangerous than truth; it gives such a lead to imagination."

So she told him, and Collingeford listened, interested. At the end he said nothing. Alix looked at his thoughtful face.

"What do you think? Is n't there a chance? Don't you think he 's possiblyprobably alive?"

The judge was not there to hear the meek appeal of faith for comfort. Collingeford met Alix's eyes frankly.

"If I were you," he said, "I would probably believe as you do. I've met too many dead men in Piccadilly looking uncommonly well ever to say that a man is dead because he 's disappeared. Then there's the other side of it. Bodsky says a man is never dead while there 's anybody left that loves him."

CHAPTER XVI

ALAN WAYNE had been away for a year. He had not returned from Montreal, but had gone on from there to work in South America and, later, to Africa.

when he met the judge on the avenue one afternoon in November.

"Judge," he said without preamble, "what 's this I hear about Gerry disappearing?"

"It 's true," said the judge, and added grimly, "he disappeared the day you went. to Montreal."

Alan colored, and his face turned grave. "I am sorry," he said. "I did n't know it."

"Sorry for what?" asked the judge; but Alan refused the opening, and the judge hardly regretted it. They were not in tune, and he felt it. His heart was heavy over Alan for his own sake. He had broken what the judge had long reverenced as a charmed circle. He had exiled himself from that which should have been dearer to him than his heart's desire. The judge wondered if he realized it. "You 're not going out to Red Hill?" he asked, trying to make the question casual.

Alan glanced at him sharply. What was the judge after?

"No," he said after a pause, "I shall not break the communal coma of Red Hill for some time. I'm off again. McDale & McDale have loaned me to Ellinson's. I've become a sort of Poohbah on construction in Africa. They get a premium. for lending me."

They walked in silence for some time, and then Alan took his leave. The judge followed his erect figure with solemn eyes. Alan had deteriorated. One cannot be the fly in the amber of more than one woman's memory without clouding one's own soul, and a clouded soul has its peculiar circumambiency which the clean can feel. The judge felt it in Alan, and winced.

If Alan did not go to the Hill, the Hill, in certain measure, came to Alan. The next afternoon found the captain once more established in his chair in a window at the club, with Alan beside him. The captain had not changed. His hair was in the same state of white insurgency, his eyes bulged in the same old way, and he still puffed when he talked. His garb was identical, and awakened the usual interest in the passing gamin.

"You'll never grow old, sir," said

Alan.

"What did I tell you about women?" repeated the captain, turning his eyes toward Alan.

Alan flushed angrily. He had no retort for the old man. He sat sullenly silent. The captain colored, too. "That's right," he said with a surprising touch of choler. "Sulk. Every badly broken colt sulks at the grip of the bit. What you need, young man, is a touch of the whip, and you 're going to get it."

And then the old man revealed a surprising knowledge of words that could lash. At first Alan was indifferent, then amazed, and finally recognized himself beaten at his own game. He came out of that interview thoroughly chastened and with an altogether new respect for the old captain. No one knew better than Alan that it took a special brand of courage to whip him with words, but the captain had not stopped to stuff his own ears with cotton-wool before engaging the enemy. He had risked all in one liquid, stinging, overwhelming volley, and he had won. Alan would not have hesitated to strike back at a saint, but he took with good grace chastisement from the old sinner.

Alan left the captain, and presented himself at the down-town offices of J. Y. Wayne & Co. They were expecting him, and he was shown in to his uncle immediately, to the exasperation of several pompous, waiting clients. It was the first time that uncle and nephew had been face to face since their memorable interview at Maple House.

J. Y. Wayne was aging; but there was no weakness in his age. He nodded toward a chair, but did not offer his hand. When he spoke, his voice was low and modulated to the tone of business.

"I wanted to see you to tell you that you have overpaid your account with me. The balance has been put to your credit. You can see the cashier about that. I want to tell you, too, that I have made too much money myself to admire a surprising capacity in that direction in any one else.

"Don't think that I don't appreciate

the significance of your wiping out a debt which you incurred unwittingly. I can see that you had to do it, because a Wayne must carry his head high in his own eyes. But-" and here J. Y.'s eyes left his nephew's expressionless face and looked vaguely into the shadows of the room; his voice took a lower key-"with all your sacrifice to pride, you have failed in pride. You have not been proud in the things that count."

J. Y.'s voice fell still lower. His words hung and dropped in the silence of the room like the far-away throb of a great bell on a still night.

"Yesterday Clem was crying because you had not come to the house. I try to think, Alan, that it 's because Clem is there that you have not come. If I could think that-" J. Y.'s eyes came slowly back to Alan's face. A dull red was burning there. J. Y. went on: "Shame is a precious thing to a man. Different creeds, different circumstances, carry us to various lengths. Ethics are elastic to-day as never before, but as long as shame holds a bit of ground in a man's battle-field, he can win back to any height."

For a long minute there was silence, then on a common impulse they both arose. Alan's eyes were wide open and moist. He held out his hand, and J. Y. gripped it. It was their whole farewell.

Back in his rooms Alan sat down and wrote to Clem:

Dear Clem: We are all two people. Uncle J. Y. cut his other half off about thirty years ago and left it behind. The judge has his other half locked up in a closet. He has never let it out at all. And so on with every one of us. This sounds very funny to you now, but some day when you are grown up you will catch your other self looking at you, and then you will understand what I mean. I am two people, too. The half of me that knows you and loves you and Red Hill, and that you love, has been away longer than the rest of me. He only got back twenty minutes ago, and it is too late for him to come and see you because he and the rest of me are off to-morrow on another trip. But he wants you to know that he is awfully sorry to have missed you. Next time I shall bring him with me, I hope, and I'll send him to you the day we arrive.

CHAPTER XVII

FROM the very beginning, the necessities of his new life called to Gerry's dormant instincts.

He had gathered desultory but primitive information. Occasional reoccurring words began to be more than mere sounds. The girl's name was Margarita; the wrinkled little woman was her aunt, Dona Maria; the two darkies were lingering relics of slave days. They had been born here. They had gone with emancipation, but they had come back. The name of the plantation was Fazenda Flores. To them it was the world. They had wandered out of it hand in hand with liberty, but they had come back because freedom was here. They needed some one to serve. Margarita had long been an orphan. The place was hers and had once been rich; but before her day water had become scarce. The place was uncared for and had fallen into its present ruin. It was well, she said, for if she had been rich, suitors would have searched her out long since. She was eighteen. She had been a woman for years.

These things, some of them distinct, some only half-formed impressions, ran in Gerry's head as he wandered over the fazenda. It had once been rich; why was it not rich now? Fertility sprang to his view on every side save one. This was the gentle slope away from the river and behind the house. Even here he discovered hummocks in alinement, vague traces of the careful tilling of another time. He climbed the slope till he came to a depression running parallel with the river. It made a line, and beyond that line was desert untamed. Cactus and thorn dotted its barren soil. Gerry followed the depression down to its end, then turned back, and followed it up. It wandered among rocks and hillocks to a natural cleft in the banks of the great river.

He climbed a point of rock. Far down to the left gleamed the old plantation house in the midst of its waste lands. Tons of water flowed past it and left it thirsting for drops. Irrigation is coeval with the birth of civilization. It had been here in this depression, lived, and passed away before he and the girl were born. He saw a vision of what Fazenda Flores had once been, what work could make it again.

The following day he rooted out two rusty spades from the debris in the old mill, fitted new handles to them, and took the old darky, Bonifacio by name, off with him to the depression. They began the long task of digging out the silt of years. Day after day, week after week, they clung to the monotonous work. The darky worked like an automaton. Work in itself to him was nothing beyond the path to food and rest at night. Labor made no demands on courage; it had no end, no goal. But Gerry's labor was dignified by conscious effort. His eyes were not in the ditch, but on the vision he had seen of what Fazenda Flores might be. The essence of slavery is older than any bonds wrought by man; the white man and the black in the ditch were its parable. The dignity and the shame of labor were side by side, paradoxically yoked to the same task.

Margarita and her aunt looked on and smiled, and joy began to settle on the girl. During Gerry's first restless week she had steeled herself each night to the thought that she would wake to find him gone. But now he was taking root. It amused him to dig. Well, let him dig. There was no end to digging.

Margarita was happy. Her cup was full. All the dreams of her girlhood were fulfilled in Gerry. A silent and strange lover, but a man-such a man as she had dreamed of, but had never seen.

One evening he sat on a bench on the veranda, fitting a handle into a dipper made of a cocoanut-shell. Margarita sat on the steps at his feet. She stayed herself on her hands and, leaning back, gazed on the starry sky and sang:

"Brunette, Brunette,
Those dreaming eyes,
Your eyes, Brunette,
They are my skies.
They are my sins,
Such eyes as they;

I look and sin,
And then I pray."

She leaned back farther and farther until she sank against his knees. He stooped over her. She threw up her arms about his neck, locked her hands, and drew him. down. He kissed her lips and sighed.

"Ah, do not sigh," she wailed. “Laugh! Laugh but once!"

CHAPTER XVIII

GERRY did not grudge the months of toil in the ditch. It was slow of growth, but there was something about it which held. his faith. It was rugged and elemental. It was the ugly source of a coming resurrection.

When it was all but done, he took Margarita and showed her his handiwork. He pointed out the little sluiceways, each with its primitive gate, a heavy log hinged on a thole-pin with a prop to hold it up and a stone to weight it when down. On the fazenda side were innumerable little trenches that stretched down into the valley.

But not until he led her to the cleft in the river gorge and showed her that half an hour's work on the sand barrier would let the river into the great ditch did she understand. And then she caught his arm and burst into violent protest and pleading.

"No, no," she cried, "you shall not do it! You shall not let in the river. The river is terrible. You must not play with it. It does not understand. You think it will do as you wish, but it will not. Oh, if you must, please, please play with it below the rapids! There it is kinder. It lets one bathe. It lets one wash clothes." Gerry got over his astonishment and laughed. Then he soothed her. Already the simpler phrases of her tongue came easily from his lips. He told her that she was foolish and a little coward. She must watch and see how tame the river would be. As he talked, a strange figure approached on the other side of the ditch.

"Father Mathias," said Margarita; "it is Father Mathias. He will help me dissuade you."

Gerry looked with awe on the spectacle presented by the new-comer. An old man, rubicund of face, his flat, wide-brimmed hat pushed well back on his gray head, was ambling toward them on a mule. A long cassock, half unbuttoned and looped about his waist, was supplemented by black trousers and flaring riding-boots. Over his head, for protection against the sun, he held an enormous white cotton umbrella lined with green. The mule stopped abruptly on the very brink of the ditch. The old priest shot off and rolled down the bank to the bottom. The mule

stood still, his fore legs slightly straddled; his pose was one of mild surprise.

Before Gerry could jump into the ditch, the priest had scrambled to his feet. "Blessing, Father!" said Margarita, gravely.

"God bless thee, daughter!" replied the priest, calmly. "But not this accursed ditch. My hands are soiled, nay, worse; scratched!" With the help of Gerry's strong grip he climbed to the top of the bank on which they stood. He smiled on them benignantly. "A strange welcome to the old father, children. What devil dug this pit for rectitude?"

"O Father," cried Margarita, "curse the ditch if you will, but do not call my man a devil! Look at him. Is he not good to see? I found him at the river. He is mine."

Gerry smiled at the girl, then at the priest. The priest smiled back.

"Thou didst find him at the river, thou daughter of Pharaoh!" cried the priest, a twinkle in his eye. "A fine babe. May he grow to be a leader of his people!"

Together they walked down to the house. Bonifacio was despatched to fetch the mule, and then Margarita drew the old priest into a vacant room. Over her shoulder she said to Gerry, "I am going to confess."

Gerry flushed and nodded. He wished that he could subject his own conscience to so simple a rite. He walked about nervously, wondering what the priest would have to say to him when he came out. But when Margarita and Father Mathias finally emerged, they were already talking of other things. The household gathered in the kitchen, and there the old father retailed the gossip of a vast country-side.

It was almost a year since he had visited this offshoot of his parish, and he had much to tell. The father was a connoisseur in gossip for women. He touched lightly on tragedies and moral slips in his community, but dwelt at length on funerals, births, marriages, where rain had fallen and where it had not, the success or failure of each of the great church fêtes, and all kindred subjects. This was the link, mused Gerry, that joined Fazenda Flores to the world and the world to Fazenda Flores.

The next morning Gerry was up early. He was excited. From this day the ditch,