ied him?'

'No, I didn't--altogether. But I should really like to remind you that
I am not in the witness box.'

'I think you owe me the truth!' he said, passionately.

'What do you call the truth?' she asked, reining in her horse and
meeting his eyes straight.

But she had to turn hers away before he answered, and he as well as
herself was conscious of the compelling effect his gaze had upon her.

'I could have made you marry me if I had been strong enough to
persist,' he said.

'Cannot any man do what he is strong enough to do--if he wishes it
enough to persist?'

'I should have put it this way. If I had thought less of you and more
of myself. But after what you said that day, when you jeered so
contemptuously at the kind of environment in which, THEN, I should have
had to place my wife--what could I do--except withdraw? But you
suffered, Bridget,' he went on vehemently. 'Not so much as I did--but
still you suffered. You thought of me--I felt it, and you must have
felt too, how continually I thought of you. I used to try and make you
think of me--dream of me. And I succeeded. Isn't that true?'

'Yes, it is true,' she answered in a low voice.

'Only lately, since I have been in the district, it has seemed to me
that the invisible wires have been set working afresh. Isn't that true
also?'

'Yes, it is true,' she said again, as if forced to the acknowledgment.

'Then, can there be any question of the bond between us? You see, it's
independent of time and space! for you WERE sorry--you DID care. That's
the truth you owe me. If after--after we parted in that dreadful way, I
had gone back, had thrown up everything, had said to you, "Come with me
ANYWHERE, let us be all in all to each other--on the slopes of the
Andes, on an island in the South Seas--you would have come?"'

'I always told you,' she said with her puzzling smile, 'that the slopes
of the Andes appealed to me.'

'Peru would have been more picturesque than this, anyway. Is that all I
can get out of you--that grudging admission? Well, never mind, I am
satisfied. You have owned up to enough. I won't tease you now for more
admissions.'

'I have admitted too much,' she said gloomily. 'The curse of the
O'Hara's is upon me. Almost all of them have gambled with their lives,
and most of them have lost.'

She gave her horse the rein as she spoke, and they cantered on over the
plain. After that, she resolutely forbade sentiment.

Mr Ninnis was gratifie