aste any on me. I don't need
it. I resent it. You may need it all for your own before I get through.
I--I am--"

MacRae's voice trailed off into an incoherent murmur. He seemed to be
floating off into those dark shadowy spaces again. In reality he was
exhausted. A man with his veins half emptied of blood cannot get in a
passion without a speedy reaction. MacRae went off into an unconscious
state which gradually became transformed into natural, healthy sleep,
the deep slumber of utter exhaustion.

At intervals thereafter he was hazily aware of some one beside him, of
soft hands that touched him. Once he wakened to find the room empty, the
lamp turned low. In the dim light and the hush the place seemed
unutterably desolate and forsaken, as if he were buried in a crypt. When
he listened he could hear the melancholy drone of the southeaster and
the rumble of the surf, two sounds that fitted well his mood. He felt a
strange relief when Betty came tiptoeing in from the kitchen. She bent
over him. MacRae closed his eyes and slept again.

He awakened at last, alert, refreshed, free of that depression which had
rested so heavily on him. And he found that weariness had caught Betty
Gower in its overpowering grip. She had drawn her box seat up close
beside him. Her body had drooped until her arms rested on the side of
the bed, and her head rested on her arms. MacRae found one of his hands
caught tight in both hers. She was asleep, breathing lightly, regularly.
He twisted his stiffened neck to get a better look at her. He could
only see one side of her face, and that he studied a long time. Pretty
and piquant, still it was no doll's face. There was character in that
firm mouth and round chin. Betty had a beautiful skin. That had been
MacRae's first impression of her, the first time he saw her. And she had
a heavy mass of reddish-brown hair that shone in the sunlight with a
decided wave in it which always made it seem unruly, about to escape
from its conventional arrangement.

MacRae made no attempt to free his hand. He was quite satisfied to let
it be. The touch of her warm flesh against his stirred him a little,
sent his mind straying off into strange channels. Queer that the first
woman to care for him when he crept wounded and shaken to the shelter of
his own roof should be the daughter of his enemy. For MacRae could not
otherwise regard Horace Gower. Anything short of that seemed treason to
the gray old man who had died in