stence that Lydia put into this sort of
campaign of hate, but she could not laugh now, for as a matter of fact
her friendship with O'Bannon was already destroyed. She hardly saw him,
and if she did there was a veil between them. He was kind, he was open
with her, he was everything except interested.

Eleanor loved O'Bannon, but with so intellectual a process that she was
not far wrong in considering it was a friendship. She would have married
him if he had asked her, but she would have done so principally to
insure herself of his company. If anyone could have guaranteed that they
would continue all their lives to live within a few yards of each other
she would have been content--content even with the knowledge that every
now and then some other less reasonable woman would come and sweep him
away from her. She knew he was of a temperament susceptible to terrible
gusts of emotion, but she considered that that was her hold upon
him--she was so safe.

The remoteness that came to their relation now indicated another woman,
and yet she knew his everyday life well enough to know that he was
seeing no one except herself and Alma Wooley; and though there was some
gossip about his attention to the girl, Eleanor felt she understood the
reason for it. Alma made him feel emotionally what he knew
rationally--that his prosecution of Lydia had been merely an act of
justice. Alma thought him the greatest of men and was tremulously
grateful to him for establishing her dead lover as a hero--a man killed
in the performance of his duty. To her imagination Lydia was an
unbelievable horror, like a wicked princess in a fairy tale. Eleanor
wondered if she did not seem somewhat the same to O'Bannon. He never
mentioned her name when she, Eleanor, spoke of her. It was like dropping
a stone into a bottomless well. She listened and listened, and nothing
came back from O'Bannon's abysmal silence. He spoke of her only once,
and that was when he came to say good-by to Eleanor the day he started
for Wyoming. He was eager to get away--into those mountains, to sleep
under the stars and forget everything and everybody in the East.

"Mercy," Eleanor thought, "how ruthless men are! I wouldn't let any
friend of mine see I was glad to leave him, even if I were."

"It's a rotten job--mine," he said. "I'm always sending people to prison
who are either so abnormal they don't seem human or else so human they
seem just like myself."

Presently Eleanor mentione