he had left the porch and Alexander had begun to grope her way
out of the vortex of confusion, that small figment of wrath that she
had known she should feel and yet had so far failed to feel, began to
grow until it engulfed and merged into itself every other element of
her reflections.

She had been scornful when Brent questioned her ability or her
permanent wish to repulse suitors, and yet after only two had come, she
no longer knew her own mind. But she told herself with a solemn
indignation, she at least wanted to make her own terms. She had no
intent of being swept off her feet by the masterful whim of a man who
had never pleaded. Yet that was the thing that had just occurred.

Slowly the stunned eyes in the waxen white face became less wonder-wide
and began to smoulder with outraged realization. She rose with the
fixed determination that before the sun set, she would kill Halloway or
compel him to kill her. One of them must die. But her own ideas of
fairness challenged that edict. If she had the right to assume such a
ground, she should have taken it without any instant of faltering. She
should never have acknowledged an impulse of thrill while she was
close-held in his arms. She had let him think that she had not
resented it, and she was as much to blame as he.

So when Halloway came back the next morning with the glow of eagerness
in his face, he found a very quiet girl waiting to receive him, and
when he would have taken her in his arms she once more put out that
warning hand, but this time with a different expression of lip and eye.

"Stop," she said. "Me an' you hev got ter talk together."

"Thet suits me," he assured her. "Thar hain't nothin' else I'd ruther
do--save ter hold ye in my arms."

"I reckon ye knows I've done took oath thet no man could ever come on
this place--sparkin'."

"I war right glad ter hev ye say that-- Hit kept other fellers away,
an' any man thet hit _could_ skeer off wasn't hardly wuth hevin' round
nohow. But thet war afore ye fell in love with me."

"Fell in love with ye?" She repeated the words after him still in that
even somewhat puzzled quiet which was, for her, almost toneless. "Jack
Halloway, when ye went away from hyar yestiddy evenin' an' I'd sat thar
fer a full measured hour an' thought, I 'lowed thar warn't a soul on
earth ner in hell thet I hated so much as you. I'd done med up my mind
ter kill ye afore I laid down ter sleep."

There was an implac