, a puzzled,
anxious nurse. He would sit up in his living-room half the night, and
when sleep overpowered his anxiety he would fall prone on the elk-hide
rug before his fire.

At last Sheila pulled herself up and crept about the house. She spent
a day in the big log chair before Hilliard's hearth, looking very wan,
shrinking from speech, her soft mouth gray and drawn.

"Aren't you ever going to smile for me again?" he asked her, after a long
half-hour during which he had stood as still as stone, his arm along the
pine mantelshelf, looking at her from the shelter of a propping hand.

She lifted her face to him and made a pitiful effort enough. But it
brought tears. They ran down her cheeks, and she leaned back and closed
her lids, but the crystal drops forced themselves out, clung to her
lashes, and fell down on her clenched hands. Hilliard went over to her
and took the small, cold hands in both of his.

"Tell me about what happened, Sheila," he begged her. "It will help."

Word by difficult word, he still holding fast to her hands, she sobbed
and gasped out her story, to which he listened with a whitening face. He
gripped her hands tighter, then, toward the end, he rose with a sharp
oath, lit his cigarette, paced to and fro.

"God!" he said at the last. "And she told you I had gone from the
country! The devil! I can't help saying it, Sheila--she tortured you. She
deserved what God sent her."

"Oh, no!"--Sheila rocked to and fro--"no one could deserve such dreadful
terror and pain. She--she wasn't sane. I was--foolish to trust her ... I
am so foolish--I think I must be too young or too stupid for--for all
this. I thought the world would be a much safer place." She looked up
again, and speech had given her tormented nerves relief, for her eyes
were much more like her own, clear and young again. "Mr. Hilliard--what
shall I do with my life, I wonder? I've lost my faith and trustingness.
I'm horribly afraid."

He stood before her and spoke in a gentle and reasonable tone. "I'll tell
you the answer to that, ma'am," he said. "I've thought that all out
while I've been taking care of you."

She waited anxiously with parted lips.

"Well, ma'am, you see--it's like this. I'm plumb ashamed of myself
through and through for the way I have acted toward you. I was a fool to
listen to that dern lunatic. She told me--lies about you."

"Miss Blake did?"

"Yes, ma'am." His face crimsoned under her look.

Sheila closed her e