he
had tried to force himself to tell her, only to fail. He hated to risk
ending this sweet, strange, thoughtless, girlish mood of hers. It might
not be soon won back--perhaps never. How could he tell what chains bound
her? And so as he vacillated between Joe's cautious advice to go slow
and his own pity the days and weeks slipped by.

One haunting fear kept him sleepless half the nights and sick even in
his dreams, and it was that the Mormon whose sealed wife she was might
come, surely would come, some night. Shefford could bear it. But what
would that visit do to Fay Larkin? Shefford instinctively feared the
awakening in the girl of womanhood, of deeper insight, of a spiritual
realization of what she was, of a physical dawn.

He might have spared himself needless torture. One day Joe Lake eyed him
with penetrating glance.

"Reckon you don't have to sleep right on that Stonebridge trail," said
the Mormon, significantly.

Shefford felt the blood burn his neck and face. He had pulled his
tarpaulin closer to the trail, and his motive was as an open page to the
keen Mormon.

"Why?" asked Shefford.

"There won't be any Mormons riding in here soon--by night--to visit
the women," replied Joe, bluntly. "Haven't you figured there might be
government spies watching the trails?"

"No, I haven't."

"Well, take a hunch, then," added the Mormon, gruffly, and Shefford
divined, as well as if he had been told, that warning word had gone to
Stonebridge. Gone despite the fact that Nas Ta Bega had reported
every trail free of watchers! There was no sign of any spies, cowboys,
outlaws, or Indians in the vicinity of the valley. A passionate
gratitude to the Mormon overcame Shefford; and the unreasonableness of
it, the nature of it, perturbed him greatly. But, something hammered
into his brain, if he loved one of these sealed wives, how could he help
being jealous?

The result of Joe's hint was that Shefford put off the hour of
revelation, lived in his dream, helped the girl grow farther and farther
away from her trouble, until that inevitable hour arrived when he was
driven by accumulated emotion as much as the exigency of the case.

He had not often walked with her beyond the dark shade of the pinyons
round the cottage, but this night, when he knew he must tell her, he led
her away down the path, through the cedar grove to the west end of the
valley where it was wild and lonely and sad and silent.

The moon was full and the