Goodloets ever knows. Lend me the money; I'll send it back!" The girl's voice was hard and defiant and she turned and faced the minister as if at bay. "Give me that money, if all that praying and singing and preaching that you've done is true. I want to go in the morning before he follows her here and puts me in hell again. God won't clean me twice."

"You shall go," came the calm answer in the apostle's beautiful voice, "but I will have to have a few days to provide a place of safety for you in the city, where the child can be cared for while you get suitable work."

"I won't wait. He'll follow her and he'll look down on me and the child and damn me again. I won't wait. I'm weak and I dasn't. Give me that money to-night!" And the demand was passionate and savage.

"Then I'll meet you at the morning train with it and rush you to a place of safety if there is no other way. You must go back home now, and it will be best not to tell anyone where you are going until you no longer fear your weakness, for they might betray your hiding place. Strength will be given you, Martha, if you only ask."

"I'll pray, Parson, I'll pray, now that you are going to give me my chance to get strong enough to be good. I'll work and I'll pray, but hide me until I do get strong." And the hard, dry sobs melted as the girl put her head down upon the gate a moment and then went out through it.

"God bless you, child, and keep you ever in thought of Him," were the words that she carried away with her as she hurried down the street toward the Settlement.

Then for a second some awful fear came across my heart that I did not understand. I now know that it was a premonition of what was to wring my own heart and I cowered against the old tree in agony. Gregory Goodloe was not more than six feet away from me on the other side of the budding, fragrant hedge, and in the moonlight I could see the beautiful strength of his golden head and strong placid face, on which lines of pain were drawn, and I had to restrain myself from crying out to him in my own pain. I wanted to go quickly and cling to his strength. Then I stopped and listened.

He had raised his face to the stars and was praying.

"O Father," he asked, as if speaking to someone with whom he walked in the cool of the midnight, "help the weak on whom the strong prey."

Then he went into the dark door of the little chapel and left me out in the cold midnight alone. The fear was gone, and comforted I went back through my budding garden and arrived at the front door just as old Mr. Pate, the telegraph operator at the little station down the street, turned in at the gate.

"Miss Charlotte," he puffed, as he fairly flung the telegram at me, "this come fer you at ten o'clock and I risked it and run up here with it after I heard them ottermobiles go by. I'm courting Mrs. Jennie Hicks myself and I understands about courtings." And before I could speak he had run on back down the street.

As I stood and looked at the yellow envelope fear again gripped my heart, and without opening it I walked into the house, locking the great door behind me with trembling fingers, and went toward a light I saw shining from the trellised back porch and which I did not understand. I have never in my life been the least bit afraid of anything, except something within my own body, from the hideous pain of my green-apple days to the pain I had felt as I talked beside the piano with Nickols in New York, a thousand miles away; but something made me pause just for a second in the pantry doorway before I stepped into the light upon the porch. I shall never forget the scene that was enacted before my wondering eyes in the dim light of a candle burning upon a table near the refrigerator.

Father stood with a bowl of ice in his hand and his fingers were just closing around a squat, black bottle that I knew contained the rarest and choicest whiskey ever run from a distillery. His iron-gray hair was rampant, his dressing gown fell away from his throat and showed the knotting of the great cords that ran down into his shoulders, and his dark eyes glittered under their heavy, black brows, while his mouth was twisted and white. Then, as I looked, something happened. A stealthy padding of feet came around the house from the garden and up the back steps, under the budding rose vine that was climbing through the trellis as if to clutch at the light, and a huge figure loomed up from out the shadow.

It was the powerful Harpeth Jaguar out hunting, and his weapon was a hoe, while under his arm he carried a roll that looked like a contribution to a rag man of bedding and old clothes.

"I tell you, Mr. Powers, there is frost in the air and I have collected everything in the parsonage that would cover those late anemones. I saw your light and I thought you might add to the collection. Now what would we do if they should be wilted by the frost just as they are ready to burst bud? Our honor is involved with Graveson, who brought the seeds all the way from Guernsey through the trenches of France and trusted them to me for propagation. Why, they represent a man's life work, and that life may be put out by a bullet any moment! We'll have to rescue them." As he spoke, the great jeweled eyes shone with excitement under the dull gold brows and he seemed not to see at all the incriminating ice and bottle.

"Could you get into Mrs. Dabney's linen closet? We've got to have something." He shivered in a little wind that blew under the rose vine with a frosty gust. I was just observing that he was attired in his pajama jacket and gray flannel trousers, and that his bare heels and ankles declared themselves above and at the back of his slippers, when my eyes were drawn to my father's face and rested there. My heart stood still while I watched it change. All the pain and appetite, straining as a beast strains at a leash, faded from his face. The deathly pallor vanished and the color of human blood returned. The glitter in his deep old eyes changed in a second from that of ferocity to that of anxious excitement.

"I do not know where the household linen is kept and I hesitate to disturb Dabney, as he retired with an aching tooth; but I observed a box of my daughter's apparel beside a trunk in the back hall which Dabney had not carried up on account of its weight and which he was requiring his wife to unpack piece by piece. I'll raid it for enough to save our treasures and accept whatever is my just chastisement in the morning," he said in a voice of guilty stealth.

And there I stood in the shadow of the pantry and saw my father take two armfuls of my costly linen and lace out into the garden. Nothing was spared me, for from the window I could see him and the marauding Jaguar weight their perfumed whiteness down with sticks and stones and clods of earth. I suffered, but silently.

"Good night, sir. God's blessing," I heard the rich voice calling as the half-bare feet padded away as swiftly as they had come through the garden, leaving father standing under the rose vine watching him go. And I watched father—and for some reason my breath seemed suspended in my lungs.

For a very long minute he stood looking at the ice bowl and the bottle; then with a queer wry smile he walked over and put them both in the refrigerator, though the bottle's place was in the sideboard, and closed the door carefully. Then he paused again and said under his breath, "You, Judge Nickols Morris Powers!" He smiled at himself with humorous pity and tiptoed past me into the front hall and up the stairway to his rooms above.

I seemed to feel strange padding footsteps