usted servant--that she
formed her desperate scheme of leaping into the sea?

Between the two oppositions of his thought a sickening burden of what he
knew to be true settled upon him. Mary Standish, even if she hated John
Graham now, had at one time--and not very long ago--been an instrument
of his trust; the letter he had written to her was positive proof of
that. What it was that had caused a possible split between them and had
inspired her flight from Seattle, and, later, her effort to bury a past
under the fraud of a make-believe death, he might never learn, and just
now he had no very great desire to look entirely into the whole truth of
the matter. It was enough to know that of the past, and of the things
that happened, she had been afraid, and it was in the desperation of
this fear, with Graham's cleverest agent at her heels, that she had
appealed to him in his cabin, and, failing to win him to her assistance,
had taken the matter so dramatically into her own hands. And within that
same hour a nearly successful attempt had been made upon Rossland's
life. Of course the facts had shown that she could not have been
directly responsible for his injury, but it was a haunting thing to
remember as happening almost simultaneously with her disappearance
into the sea.

He drew away from the window and, opening the door, went out into the
night. Cool breaths of air gave a crinkly rattle to the swinging paper
lanterns, and he could hear the soft whipping of the flags which Mary
Standish had placed over his cabin. There was something comforting in
the sound, a solace to the dishevelment of nerves he had suffered, a
reminder of their day in Skagway when she had walked at his side with
her hand resting warmly in his arm and her eyes and face filled with the
inspiration of the mountains.

No matter what she was, or had been, there was something tenaciously
admirable about her, a quality which had risen even above her feminine
loveliness. She had proved herself not only clever; she was inspired by
courage--a courage which he would have been compelled to respect even in
a man like John Graham, and in this slim and fragile girl it appealed to
him as a virtue to be laid up apart and aside from any of the motives
which might be directing it. From the beginning it had been a
bewildering part of her--a clean, swift, unhesitating courage that had
leaped bounds where his own volition and judgment would have hung
waveringly; that one