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 —some of us believe in you, and your conscience is clear, you can hold your head up in spite of their prejudice."

"As long as you believe in me, Miss Sallie, I can feel the clouds scrape my hair."

He waited outside while she unlocked the door and left her burden of blooms in her room, and not until he had parted from her at her own gate was he conscious again of the listening strain for the unheard footfall at his back. That phantom had left him for a little while in what seemed to him her holy presence. Now it had returned in aggravation, as if to impress upon him the fatuity of planning any felicitous thing for his future days.

There could be no peace, there could be no planning, indeed, until the day of reckoning between him and Dee Winch. Until that day he must walk with his life in pawn, with no right to love and inspire love, no right to plan and build and hope like other men. With his faculties centered on the invisible thing behind him, ready to wheel and fire at the first sound of that threatening step, he must walk the earth a listening man.

Moodily he walked the streets after supper that evening, turning in his mind many things. His heart urged him to the presence of Sallie McCoy, where he knew he should find welcome and the comfort of faith, but his honor held him back.