THE following morning when Stella, sitting up in bed, opened her mail and read Ackerman’s report, the last doubt of John Graham’s guilt was shattered.

“I have just learned,” Ackerman wrote, “that a number of men of notoriously desperate character from the foot of the mountains were in Independence on the day before the tragedy and that a man by the name of Dan Wiley, their leader, reported in person to John Graham’s office.”

Stella sprang from her bed and began hurriedly to dress.

“Now God give me strength for the work I’m going to do!” she cried, with strangling rage. “To think that such a man should dare to speak to me of love—should dare to clasp my hand with the stain of my father’s blood yet fresh on his! I could kill him with my own hand—coward, dastard, sneak, assassin! I hate him—I hate him!”

She threw herself on her bed again in a paroxysm of uncontrollable fury. She arose at length, calm, alert, her cheeks flushed with brilliant colour, her great eyes dilated wide and sparkling with courage.

The knocker struck sharply and she remembered with a start that Steve Hoyle had returned on the midnight train and would call this morning. She heard Maggie show Steve into the library.

Without waiting for her breakfast she hastened to meet him, and he plunged at once into the purpose of his call:

“Has John Graham yet confessed his leadership?”

“He will to-day,” was the quiet answer.

“The fame of your desperate love affair has set the town agog,” Steve laughed triumphantly.

“Doubtless,” she replied moodily.

“I’ve everything arranged—the men are only waiting for the word.”

“I prefer that the law take its course. I’m not ready to commit murder,” she said emphatically.

“Nonsense! The law’s a farce—Deliver him to his own men to be judged by the Klan which has set itself above the State. If he is the leader of the Invisible Empire he holds his own High Court. Let his men decide his fate. It’s justice!”

Stella hesitated a moment and slowly said:

“When I learn from his own lips that he is the Chief of the Klan and find that there is no other way in which he can be made to pay the penalty of his crime, I’ll deliver him to his men.”

“They’ll be ready to receive him.”

“I shall know in twenty-four hours.”

“I’ll await your word,” he answered eagerly, his eyes devouring her beauty.

Steve hurriedly left and Stella seated herself at her desk to write her answer to John Graham. Two attempts she tore up. The third suited her. In the centre of a sheet of paper she wrote two words:

“Come—Stella.”

When John Graham received this note at eleven o’clock from the hands of her messenger, he felt before he broke the seal that it bore glad tidings.

He tore it open and with a cry of joy, tried to read, and the tears blinded him. He crushed the note in his hand and bowed his head on his desk, his whole being convulsed with emotion which he could not control. He rose at length, walked to his window, opened the note again and gazed at it until he broke into a joyous laugh, repeating the words:

“Come—Stella.”

“The most wonderful letter I ever received,” he exclaimed. “The longest, the richest, the deepest—the answering call of my mate! In all nature there’s no such cry. From out the shadows of hell I lift my soul and answer, ‘My love, I come!’”

In a moment he had forgotten every fear; and all the pain, blind and hideous, of the last three days was lost in a joy that lit the world with splendour.

He called immediately on horseback and asked her to ride with him through a beautiful wooded road he had long wished to show her. Stella caught the echo of his horse’s hoofs with a shudder as he approached the house. She had not heard that sound on the gravelled roadway of the lawn since the night she listened to the distant echoes of the masqueraders as she stood beside the dead.

She accepted his suggestion and hastily despatched a message to Ackerman asking that he await her return in her library at sundown as she intended to spend the afternoon in the country on important business.

At three o’clock they galloped out of Independence toward the river.

“My heart is too full now for speech,” he said, leaning toward her, his face radiant with happiness.

“I understand.”

“Just to be near you is all I ask for a while. It seems too good to be true. It has been a century since I saw you.”

She remained silent. The only visible response, if any, was the quickening of her horse’s pace at the unconscious touch of the little spur concealed beneath her skirts.

Her silence meant to him feelings too deep for words, and again his heart sang for joy.

Four miles out of town they left the main highway and turned into the narrow crooked road which wound along the banks of a creek through the densest forest in the county.

“I’m going to take you to ‘Inwood,’ General Gaston’s place. The house was burned by Sherman’s army, only the vine-covered ruins are standing now. It was the finest house ever built in the state, and many a gay party held high carnival there in the old days.”

“I’ve heard my mother speak of it,” she answered soberly, glancing at him from the corner of her eye. “In fact, it was there at a picnic one day that my father proposed to his sweetheart and my mother accepted him, and planned their elopement. How strange that you should have chosen to bring me to this place to-day!”

“You’ll understand it later,” he quickly responded.

“I hope you don’t mean to kidnap me?”

“It might be advisable in view of the events of the past three days,” he laughed.

She glanced about her at the deep shadows of the great trees through which they had been passing for more than a mile and shot at him a sudden look of fear.

“Let’s turn back,” she said, flushing and reining her horse to a stand.

A look of pain clouded his face as he bent near.

“Surely, dearest, you can trust the man who worships you! Come, we are only a few hundred yards from the gate.”

“Then I’ll trust you that much further,” she said with a light laugh, spurring her horse forward.

In a few minutes they passed through the ruined gate in the edge of the woods. The broken marble figures which once crowned the brick pillars lay beside the entrance among a mass of tangled blackberry briars. They had been pried from their places and hurled there by the bayonets of Sherman’s men and had not been touched since.

The lawn, which once had spread its beautiful carpet of flowers and shrubbery in wide acres here in the heart of the ancient woods, had grown up in ugly broom straw and young pines, which were slowly strangling to death the more delicate forms of life. The dark fir trees, magnolia and holly, still flourished in luxury.

Towering in solemn, serried line on a gentle eminence still stood the six great white............