his talk, pressed his
lips ardently, passionately to hers.

Taken by surprise, she uttered one of her fluent Spanish oaths and,
springing to her feet, stood with her body slightly bent forward, her
hands on her hips, gazing at him with her narrow, gleaming eyes. Her
apathy was gone, she was alive now to her finger tips.

He rose, too. "Honey, what is it?" he questioned dazedly. "What's got
you now?"

"Don't touch me," she said tensely. "Don't dare to touch me."

He looked at her unbelievingly and then fell back a pace or two. "My
Lord! What's the matter with you?" he cried.

"I don't know," she muttered wildly. Her eyes still measured him, his
bold, obvious good looks, his ruddy self-complacency, his habitual and
shallow geniality, the satisfied vanity of a mouth steadily becoming
looser; the depiction of years of self-indulgence in the little veins on
his highly colored cheeks; the sagging lines of his well-set-up figure,
ever taking on more flesh.

So she saw him, not perhaps as he was, but in the light of her own harsh
and unmodified criticism, and mercilessly she reflected upon him all the
scorn she felt for herself. She did not consider or even remember that
with what strength of affection he possessed he had loved her; that,
after his constitution he had given her of his best, all he had to give,
in fact; that for her he had more than once faced danger, and just to
see her again was even now facing it, fearlessly.

He had grown to expect from her an infinite variety of moods, but
something in her pose, her expression, frightened him now. "Honey, what
are you driving at?" he asked, a little tremulously, and stretched out
his hand to lay it on her shoulder.

But again an oath whipped from her lips, her glance darkened. She drew
back from him with the horse-shoe frown showing plainly on her forehead.

He looked at her, his whole face broken up, his mouth trembling,
something like tears in his eyes. "Why, Pearl," he faltered, "ain't you
glad to see me? Why, here I been waiting all these damned, dreary
months, never thinking of any one but you, never even looking at another
woman, just dreaming of the moment when I could put my arms around you
again and know that you loved me and were mine."

A hard and bitter smile showed on her mouth. "Yours! Loved you!" she
cried. "My God! You!"

Her unmistakable, unconcealed scorn was like a dagger thrust in the
heart, and that stab of pain stirred his anger and resto