And the dark tide of men, the hurry and din, the wind and dust, the flickering lights, all retreated spectral—­like to the background of a mind returned to youth, hope, love, home.  She saw herself at eighteen—­yes, Beauty Stanton even then, possessed of a beauty that was her ruin; at school, the favorite of a host of boys and girls; at home, where the stately oaks were hung with silver moss and the old Colonial house rang with song of sister and sport of brother, where a sweet-faced, gentle-voiced mother—­

“Ah ...  Mother!” And at that word the dark tide of men seemed to rise and swell at her, to trample her sacred memory as inevitably and brutally as it had used her body.

Only the piercing pang of that memory remained with Beauty Stanton.  She was a part of Benton.  She was treading the loose board-walk of the great and vile construction camp.  She might draw back from leer and touch, but none the less was she there, a piece of this dark, bold, obscure life.  She was a cog in the wheel, a grain of dust in the whirlwind, a morsel of flesh and blood for the hungry maw of a wild and passing monster of progress.

Her hurried steps carried her on with her errand.  Neale!  She knew where to find him.  Often she had watched him play, always regretfully, conscious that he did not fit there.  His indifference had baffled her as it had piqued her professional vanity.  Men had never been indifferent to her; she had seen them fight for her mocking smiles.  But Neale!  He had been stone to her charm, yet kind, gracious, deferential.  Always she had felt strangely shamed when he stood bareheaded before her.  Beauty Stanton had foregone respect.  Yet respect was what she yearned for.  The instincts of her girlhood, surviving, made a whited sepulcher of her present life.  She could not bear Neale’s indifference and she had failed to change it.  Her infatuation, born of that hot-bed of Benton life, had beaten and burned itself to destruction against a higher and better love—­the only love of her womanhood.  She would have slaved for him.  But he had passed her by, absorbed with his own secret, working toward some fateful destiny, lost, perhaps, like all the others there.

And now she learned that the mystery of him—­his secret—­was the same old agony of love that sent so many on endless, restless roads —­Allie Lee! and he believed her dead!

After all the bitterness, life had moments of sweetest joy.  Fate was being a little kind to her—­Beauty Stanton.  It would be from her lips Neale would hear that Allie Lee was alive—­Beauty Stanton’s soul seemed to soar with the realization of how that news would uplift Neale, craze him with happiness, change his life, save him.  He was going to hear the blessed tidings from a woman whom he had scorned.  Always afterward, then, he would think of Beauty Stanton with a grateful heart.  She was to be the instrument of his salvation.  Hough and Ancliffe had died to save Allie Lee from the vile clutch of Benton;