with all a
man's passions, with all the caution to be expected in one of his
class. If he still loved her sufficiently, following a period of
mature deliberation and fierce opposition from his people, to offer
her honorable marriage, would she not be a fool to cast away such a
priceless gift? How few men know love so strong, so tender, so
unselfish, that they do not shrink from sharing with the object of
their love, the odium which society has always set upon the woman
taken in adultery.

In rejecting his proffered sacrifice, she had told herself that she
acted thus in order to preserve his happiness, although at the expense
of her own. By so doing Nan realized that she had taken a lofty, a
noble stand; nevertheless, who was she that she should presume to
decide just wherein lay the preservation of his happiness? In her
grandfather's letter before her she had ample evidence of the
miscarriage of such pompous assumptions.

There is a latent force in the weakest of women, an amazing capacity
for rebellion in the meekest and a regret for lost virtue even in the
most abandoned. Nan was neither weak, meek, nor abandoned; wherefore,
to be accorded toleration, polite contumely and resentment where
profound gratitude and admiration were her due, had aroused in her a
smouldering resentment which had burned like a handful of oil-soaked
waste tossed into a corner. At first a mild heat; then a dull red glow
of spontaneous combustion progresses--and presently flame and smoke.

It is probable that mere man, who never has been able to comprehend
the intensity of feeling of which a woman is capable, is not equal to
the problem of realizing the effect of solitude, misunderstanding and
despair upon the mind of a woman of more than ordinary sensibilities
and imagination. The seed of doubt, planted in such soil, burgeons
rapidly, and when, upon the very day that Mr. Daney had made his last
call at the Sawdust Pile, Nan, spurred to her decision by developments
of which none but she was aware, had blazed forth in open rebellion
and given the Tyee Lumber Company's general manager the fright of his
prosaic existence.

XXXIX

After leaving the Sawdust Pile, Mr. Daney walked twice around the
Bight of Tyee before arriving at a definite decision as to his future
conduct in this intrigue, participation in which had been thrust upon
him by his own loyalty to his employer and the idiocy of three
hare-brained women. Time and again as li