his arm.

"You lie!" and she set her teeth. "A lot you care! Do you think I'm a
silly? Do you think as I don't know that you want to sling me and don't
know how to go about it?" and she grasped his arm savagely.

Haughton looked at her in gloomy silence for a few seconds. Standing
there, face to face, they looked so alike in features--he wiry,
muscular, black-bearded, and bronzed to the hue of an Arab, and she
tall, dark-haired, with oval, passionate face--they might have been
taken for brother and sister.

She let his arm free, and then, being only a working miner's wife, and
possessing no handkerchief, whipped her apron to her eyes.

"You're a damned cur!" she said, chokingly. "If it hadn't ha' been for
you I'd ha' gone along all right wi' Bob, and put up wi' livin' in this
place; an' now------"

"Look here, Nell," said Haughton, drawing her away into the shadow of
the forge, "I'm a cur, as you say; but I'd be a worse cur to keep on
this way. You can't marry me, can you?"

"You used to talk about our boltin'--_once_" and she snapped out the
last word.

Haughton tried to explain why the "bolting" so trenchantly referred to
did not eventuate. He was stone-broke. Ballantyne was going to do his
own amalgamating at the battery, and it would be cruel of him to ask
her to share his fortunes. (Here he began to appreciate his leaning
to morality.) If she was a single girl he would stay at Mulliner's and
fight it out with bad luck for her sake; but they couldn't go on like
this any more. And the people at Mulliner's were beginning to talk about
them, &c, &c.

She heard him in silence, and then gave a short, jarring laugh--the
laugh that ought to tell a man that he is no longer believed in--by a
woman who has loved him.

"I know," she said, quietly, "you want to get clear o' me. You're took
up with Kate Channing, the _proper_ Miss Channing that rides over here
o' Sundays to meet you on the sly."

At first he meant to undeceive her, then he thought, "What does it
matter? I'll be away from here in a day or so, and after I've gone
she'll find I'm not so base as she thought me, poor girl;" so, looking
away from her so as to avoid the dangerous light that gleamed in her
passionate eyes, he made the plunge.

"That's it, Nell. I'm hard up and desperate. If you were a free
woman----"

She struck him in the mouth with her clenched hand--"I'll kill her
first, Dick Haughton," and then left him.

*****

A mile or so out