til
within the past two days what all this chicanery and double-dealing
might be doing to me, but now I do know."

"Will it bear telling?" she asked quietly.

"I think not--to you," he returned, matching her low tone. "Let it be
enough to say that I am no longer the man I was when I came out here.
Patricia, I'm not fighting bare-handed any more; I'm smashing in with
any weapon I can get hold of. There will be no such reform as the one
you urged me to champion--as the era of fair-dealing and sincerity which
I have been trying honestly and earnestly to inaugurate. Nevertheless,
if my hand doesn't tremble too much at the critical moment, there will
be, on the morning of next Tuesday, such a revolution as this
commonwealth has never seen. Though they have robbed me and made a
puppet of me, I can still bring it about."

He had gone farther than he meant to, and he thought she would protest.
He knew that her convictions of what should be and what should not be
were clear-cut and definite. But a man, even though he be a lover, may
know a woman's mind without knowing very much about the woman herself.
There was no protest forthcoming. Quite the contrary, she answered him
with a little shudder that was almost a caress, saying: "I think you
have grown--bigger and stronger than I ever thought you could grow,
Evan; and I'm sure your hand won't tremble. Is that what you want me to
say?"

Since there is no more contradictory being in a sentient world than a
man in love, Blount was not quite sure that it was what he wanted her to
say. By times, to any lover worthy of the name, the chosen woman figures
as a goddess, a tutelary divinity postulating for a mere earthly man all
that is high and holy and inerrant; an impeccable standard by which he
can measure his own baser desires and ambitions and be shrived of them.
At other times the straitly human has its innings, and the longing is
for a comrade, a companion, a second self buried, lost, submerged in the
loyalty which never questions. Having come slowly to maturity as a
lover, Blount had been leaning toward the divinity definition of
Patricia Anners. But now the iconoclastic change was breaking many
images.

"You are willing to believe that I haven't gone altogether backward?" he
queried, after the little car had measured an additional stretch of the
mesa road.

"You are bigger and stronger," she repeated.

"How do you know I am?"

"I can tell; any woman could tell."

"Is