The Redemption of Kenneth Galt

|YOUNG Doctor Dearing sat in the little church at an open window through which he had a partial view of that portion of old Stafford which stretched out desultorily toward the e...

|DR. DEARING'S house was an old-fashioned structure built long before the Civil War. It fronted on the main residential street of the town, and was of red brick partly covered w...

|THE greater part of the ensuing afternoon was spent by Dr. Dearing in his musty little office on the ground-floor of a building in the central square of the town which was devo...

|LEAVING Madge mute and motionless at the gate, staring through the starlight after him, Dearing strode down the street past the fine old home of Kenneth Galt, which was set wel...

|WHEN Fred Walton left Dearing's office, he went along the street toward his father's home. He walked slowly, absolute despair showing itself in the droop of his powerful body,...

REACHING the depot in the edge of the town where there were only three or four cottages, a hotel of the lowest class, and a negro dive masquerading as a restaurant, at which fri...

|THE cot was hard and narrow, and it had sides of unpadded boards. For hours Fred lay pretending to be asleep, that he might shirk the sheer torture of conversation with his fri...

|THAT morning, about nine o'clock, old Simon Walton rode down to his bank in the one-horse buggy of antiquated type which had come into his possession years before in the forecl...

|AS was only natural in a town of the size of Stafford, the sudden departure of Fred Walton, under circumstances no one seemed able to explain, caused wide and growing comment....

|ONE evening, two days later, General Sylvester and his niece and nephew sat on the front veranda to catch the cool breezes which swept across the town and stirred the foliage o...

|A FEW days after the report of Dora Barry's fall had permeated Stafford from the town's centre to its scattering outskirts, and the beautiful girl's disgrace had been duly reco...

|KENNETH GALT came back from Atlanta at the end of the week. John Dilk drove down, and brought him up from the station at dusk. Galt had just alighted at his front steps, and th...

|BRAVE, very brave, and sweet and noble!” he said to himself, as he walked back toward the gate of his grounds; “but she certainly sha'n't have her way. I'm not low enough for t...

|THE morning sun beat fiercely down on Fred Walton and his new friend as they trudged along the dusty road. The pangs of hunger had seized them, and no way seemed open to obtain...

|I SWEAR, I'd enjoy firing _his_ barn!” Dick fumed, as the two friends walked on through the beating sun. “I don't think I can stand much more of it, Fred. I'm all gone inside....

|IT was not till early autumn that the two friends reached their far-off destination. Fred's watch had been sold; they had saved the greater part of their earnings from the vari...

|OLD Stafford had changed wonderfully in the six years which passed after Fred Walton's flight. The building of President Galt's trunk-line to the sea had marked the turning-poi...

|HURRYING down through the grounds, and vaulting over the low boundary fence, Dearing approached the gate of the Barry cottage just as Dora came out. Pretty as she had been in g...

|ONE warm, fair afternoon in May, Kenneth Galt, at the earnest solicitation of General Sylvester, came home. Under big captions the Stafford papers had proudly given the particu...

|SIX years had wrought a wonderful change in Gate City. It had increased in size and importance. Stephen Whipple was still the only wholesale grocer of the place, and Fred Walto...

|ABOUT ten days after the happenings recorded in the foregoing chapter old Simon Walton sat alone in his office. A typewriter was clicking in the counting-room adjoining, its so...

|OH, here you are, you old agnostic!” Wynn Dearing called out jovially to Galt, one afternoon when he found the railroad president walking to and fro on the veranda of the latte...

“To think that any man could lecture me like that, while I have had to stand and take it like a sneaking coward!” he fumed. “I am not a jot worse than thousands of others who we...

|EVERYTHING is as merry as a marriage bell, and the goose hangs high!” Stephen Whipple quoted, with a hearty laugh, as he and Fred Walton sat on the old man's veranda after brea...

|FRED and his jovial employer spent a ===day and night at New Orleans, and early the following morning took a fast train for New York. Ensconced in the luxurious Pullman, which...

sounded strange to him. He followed now in their wake, and saw them turn in another direction. Then he saw a man approaching, but he walked from side to side of the pavement, as...

|THE two friends had been in New York five days, and in the continual round of theatres, and in sight-seeing, with occasional call at some establishment with which Whipple had d...

|KENNETH GALT was now living the life of a recluse in his old home. The tendency to this sort of existence belongs to rare and exceptional temperaments. He kept assuring himself...

|DORA BARRY sat at her easel absorbed in the painting of a picture, though the afternoon light was fading from her canvas in a way that made the work difficult, when her mother...

|THE July sun beat fiercely on the tin slate roofs of the houses forming square of Stafford. It was noon, business was at a standstill. The clerks and typewriters in Walton's ba...

|TAKING up his satchel, the merchant strode heavily from the room. Doubting if he had heard aright, Walton tore open the envelope and took out the bills. He spread them on the d...

|IT was a delightfully cool and crisp morning for midsummer, and Doctor Dearing was on the lawn between his house and Galt's, when he noticed that the railroad president had com...

|TOBY LASSITER returned from the West one sultry evening at dusk, and went straight to the house of his employer. He found the banker seated on the front porch without his coat,...

|SIMON WALTON had been away a week, and the force at the bank had not heard from him, when one morning Toby received a telegram from him dated that day in Atlanta. The carefully...

|ONE afternoon, three days after this, Simon Walton drove down the street to Dearing's, and, alighting at the front gate, he carefully haltered his horse to the hitching-post wi...

|WHEN he had disappeared down the street, Margaret sat staring at the ground, her color still high, her eyes holding a delicate, spiritual effulgence, her breast rising and fall...

|MARGARET DEARING passed a restless, tumultuous night following the disturbing visit to Dora. In the evening she had joined her uncle at a game of whist in a nervous, abstracted...

“Yes, he is the one,” she mused. “He of all men! And yet I might have known it; he has adored the child since the moment he first saw it there on the lawn.”

|UNDER a growing weight of uneasiness, combined with a sense of utter discontent with himself, Galt put Lionel down when he had half listened to his accusing prattle for an hour...

|WHEN Kenneth Galt waked the next morning it was with the new sense of having slept long and restfully for the first time in years. The sun was streaming into his windows from t...

|INTO the wood, a wild, unbrageous tract of land lying back of the cottage, he strode, full of ponderous fears as to the outcome of his undertaking, and yet vaguely buoyed up by...

time,” she said, wrathful, in her cold, unrelenting beauty. “I can't accept money, even for him, which was earned as the price of his mother's public disgrace. He is mine, and h...

|ON his left, farther away from the town, and about a mile distant, stood a small mountain. Dark-red as to soil, bristling with sandstone bowlders, sparcely grown with pines and...

|ON the morning of the fourth day after the meeting of Dora and Kenneth Galt, old Stafford was stirred to its outskirts by the return of the most popular young man who had ever...