re bald--even stupid.

The girl's troubled eyes were looking up into his in a desperate hope.
It was almost as if this man were her only support, and she were
making one final appeal before abandoning altogether her saving hold.

"Forget them? Oh, Buck, Buck, you don't know what you are saying. You
don't understand--you can't, or you would not speak like that. You
see," she went on, forgetting in her trouble that this man did not
know her story, "Ike was here. Here! He made--love to me. He--he
kissed me. He brutally kissed me when I had no power to resist him.
And now--now this has happened."

But the man before her had suddenly changed while she was speaking.
The softness had left his eyes. They had suddenly become hot, and
bloodshot, and hard. His breath came quickly, heavily, his thin
nostrils dilating with the furious emotion that swept through his
body. Ike had kissed her. He had forgotten all her sufferings in his
own sudden, jealous fury.

Joan waited. The change in the man had passed unobserved by her. Then,
as no answer was forthcoming, she went on--

"Wherever I go it is the same. Death and disaster. Oh, it is awful!
Sometimes I think I shall go mad. Is there no corner of the earth
where I can hide myself from the shadow of this haunting curse?"

"Ike kissed you?"

Buck's voice grated harshly. Somehow her appeal had passed him by.
All his better thoughts and feelings were overshadowed for the moment.
A fierce madness was sweeping through his veins, his heart, his brain,
a madness of feeling such as he had never before experienced.

The girl answered him, still without recognizing the change.

"Yes," she said in a dull, hopeless way. "And the inevitable happened.
It followed swiftly, surely, as it always seems to follow. He is
dead."

"He got it--as he should get it. He got no more than he'd have got if
I'd been around."

Buck's mood could no longer escape her. She looked into the hard,
young face, startled. She saw the fury in his eyes, the clenched jaws,
with their muscles outstanding with the force of the fury stirring
him.

The sight agitated her, but somehow it did not frighten. She half
understood. At least she thought she did. She read his resentment as
that of a man who sees in the outrage a breaking of all the laws of
chivalry. She missed the real note underlying it.

"What does his act matter?" she said almost indifferently, her mind on
what she regarded as the real tragedy. "He was d