the girl, as if he failed to hear her clearly.

"An' just think 'bout your book," Judy continued pleadingly. "Think
'bout all them fine things you-all have done wrote down for everybody
ter read,--'bout the river allus a-goin' on just the same, no matter
what happens, an' 'bout Auntie Sue an'--"

She stopped, and drew away from him, frightened at the look that came
into the man's face.

"Don't, Mr. Burns! Don't!" she half-screamed. "'Fore God, you-all
oughten ter look like that!"

The man threw up his head, and laughed,--laughed as the wild, reckless
and lost Brian Kent had laughed that black night when, in the drifting
boat, he had cursed the life he was leaving and had drunk his profane
toast to the darkness into which he was being carried.

Raising the manuscript, which represented all that the past months of
his re-created life had meant to him, and grasping it in both hands, he
shook it contemptuously, as he said, with indescribable bitterness and
the reckless surrendering of every hope: "'All them fine things that I
have wrote down for everybody ter read.'" He mimicked her voice with a
sneer, and laughed again. Then: "It's all a lie, Judy, dear;--a damned
lie. Auntie Sue is a saint, and believes it. She made me believe it
for a little while,--her beautiful, impossible dream-philosophy of the
river. The river,--hell!--the river is as treacherous and cruel and
false and tricky and crooked as life itself! And I am as warped and
twisted in mind and soul as you are in body, Judy, dear. Neither of us
can help it. We were made that way by the river. To hell with the whole