was enough to have purged her of vanities.  She had grown fat and sad and yellow and dull.  But when the means came, she felt a rekindled desire to assume the perquisites of her sex—­to sit at tea tables; to buy futile things; to whitewash the hideous veracity of life with a little form and ceremony.  So she coldly vetoed Pike’s proposed system of fortifications, and announced that they would descend upon the world, and gyrate socially.

And thus, at length, it was decided, and the thing done.  The village of Laurel was their compromise between Mrs. Garvey’s preference for one of the large valley towns and Pike’s hankering for primeval solitudes.  Laurel yielded a halting round of feeble social distractions comportable with Martella’s ambitions, and was not entirely without recommendation to Pike, its contiguity to the mountains presenting advantages for sudden retreat in case fashionable society should make it advisable.

Their descent upon Laurel had been coincident with Yancey Goree’s feverish desire to convert property into cash, and they bought the old Goree homestead, paying four thousand dollars ready money into the spendthrift’s shaking hands.

Thus it happened that while the disreputable last of the Gorees sprawled in his disreputable office, at the end of his row, spurned by the cronies whom he had gorged, strangers dwelt in the halls of his fathers.

A cloud of dust was rolling, slowly up the parched street, with something travelling in the midst of it.  A little breeze wafted the cloud to one side, and a new, brightly painted carryall, drawn by a slothful gray horse, became visible.  The vehicle deflected from the middle of the street as it neared Goree’s office, and stopped in the gutter directly in front of his door.

On the front seat sat a gaunt, tall man, dressed in black broadcloth, his rigid hands incarcerated in yellow kid gloves.  On the back seat was a lady who triumphed over the June heat.  Her stout form was armoured in a skin-tight silk dress of the description known as “changeable,” being a gorgeous combination of shifting hues.  She sat erect, waving a much-ornamented fan, with her eyes fixed stonily far down the street.  However Martella Garvey’s heart might be rejoicing at the pleasures of her new life, Blackjack had done his work with her exterior.  He had carved her countenance to the image of emptiness and inanity; had imbued her with the stolidity of his crags, and the reserve of his hushed interiors.  She always seemed to hear, whatever her surroundings were, the scaly-barks falling and pattering down the mountain-side.  She could always hear the awful silence of Blackjack sounding through the stillest of nights.

Goree watched this solemn equipage, as it drove to his door, with only faint interest; but when the lank driver wrapped the reins about his whip, awkwardly descended, and stepped into the office, he rose unsteadily to receive him, recognizing Pike Garvey, the new, the transformed, the recently civilized.