" Again the ghost smiled forth. "Do you fancy I'm so dull that
I don't realise what I'm doing, what you've done?"

For the second time the involuntary colour appeared; but the role that
the man was playing, the role of the injured, was too effective to
abandon at once.

"You can't deny that you've held me away all this last week, Bess," he
objected. "You've permitted me to call and call again; but that is all.
Otherwise we're not a bit nearer than we were when I first returned."

"Nearer?" This time the smile did not come. Even the ghost refused to
appear. "I wonder if that's true." A pause. "At least I've gotten
immeasurably farther away from another."

"Your husband you mean?"

"I mean How. There are but you and he in my life."

The pose was abandoned. It was useless now.

"Tell me, Bess," said the man intimately. "You and I mean too much to
each other not to know everything there is to know."

"There's nothing to tell." The girl did not dissimulate now. The
inevitable was in sight, approaching swiftly--and she herself had
chosen. "He's merely given me up."

"He knows, Bess?" Blank unbelief was on the questioner's face, something
else as well, something akin to exultation.

"Yes," repressedly. "He's known since that first night."

"And he hasn't objected, hasn't done anything at all?"

Just for an instant, ere came second thought, the old defiance, the old
pride, broke forth.

"Do you fancy you would be here now, that you wouldn't have known before
this if he objected?" she flamed.

"Bess!"

"I beg your pardon. I shouldn't have said that." Already the blaze had
died, never to be rekindled. "Forget that I said that. I didn't mean
to."

The man did not answer, he scarcely heard. Almost as by a miracle, the
last obstacle had been removed from his way. He had counted upon
blindness, the unsuspicion of perfect confidence; but a passive,
conscious conformity such as this--The thing was unbelievable,
providential, too unnaturally good to last. The present was a strategic
moment, the time for immediate, irrevocable action, ere there came a
change of heart. It had not been a part of Clayton Craig's plans to
permit a meeting between himself and the Indian. As a matter of fact he
had taken elaborate, and, as it proved, unnecessary precautions to
avoid such a consummation. Even now, the necessity passed, he did not
alter his plans. Not that he was afraid of the red man. He had proven to
himself by an incontro