th a regret that he
did not hide from her.

And yet, when he was at last in his room at the hotel that night, he
wrote to Clare Kavanagh the longest letter of all those he had written
to her since he left Fort Canibas.

It might have been because he had so much to write about.

It might have been because a strange little feeling of compunction
bothered him.

But Harlan did not have the courage to examine his sentiments too
closely. Only, after he had sealed the letter and inscribed it, he lay
back in his chair awhile, and then, having reflected that after three
weeks he would no longer be his own man, he decided that he'd better run
up to Fort Canibas and attend to his business interests.

And he departed hastily the next morning, in spite of the Duke's puzzled
and rather indignant protests that business wasn't suffering beyond what
the telephone and mails could cure, and that he himself would go home
the next week and see to everything.

There are some men who are strong enough to run away from weakness. Not
that Harlan Thornton admitted that he was weak in the presence of
Madeleine Presson. But he felt a sudden hunger for the big hills, the
wide woods, the serene silences. He wanted to get his mental footing
again. He had been swept off in a flood of new experiences. Just now he
found himself in a state of mind that he did not understand.

"I'll go back and let the old woods talk to me," he whispered to
himself.

Then he tore up the letter he had written to Clare Kavanagh.

It had occurred to him that he could tell it to her so much better.

So when he came to Fort Canibas in the evening of the second day he
mounted his horse and rode across the big bridge.

He went before he had read the letters piled on the table in the gloomy
old mess-hall. And he brusquely told the waiting Ben Kyle to save his
business talk until the morning.

CHAPTER XX

A GIRL'S HEART

He walked his horse when he reached the farther shore. He was wondering
just what he was to say to Dennis Kavanagh. They had not parted in a
manner that invited further intimacy. From twin windows of the house on
the hill lights glowed redly, as though they were Dennis Kavanagh's
baleful little eyes. Fear was not the cause of the young man's
hesitation. But he dreaded another scene in the presence of the girl.
Kavanagh and his grandfather had brutally violated an innocent
friendship. They had put into insulting words what neither he nor C