, she shook
under the whip of this inconceivable fact. Lost! Lost! She wailed
her misery. She might as well be what she had made Jean Isbel think
she was. If she had been shamed before, she was now abased, degraded,
lost in her own sight. And if she would have given her soul for his
kisses, she now would have killed herself to earn back his respect.
Jean Isbel had given her at sight the deference that she had
unconsciously craved, and the love that would have been her salvation.
What a horrible mistake she had made of her life! Not her mother's
blood, but her father's--the Jorth blood--had been her ruin.

Again Ellen fell upon the soft pine-needle mat, face down, and she
groveled and burrowed there, in an agony that could not bear the sense
of light. All she had suffered was as nothing to this. To have
awakened to a splendid and uplifting love for a man whom she had
imagined she hated, who had fought for her name and had killed in
revenge for the dishonor she had avowed--to have lost his love and what
was infinitely more precious to her now in her ignominy--his faith in
her purity--this broke her heart.

CHAPTER XI

When Ellen, utterly spent in body and mind, reached home that day a
melancholy, sultry twilight was falling. Fitful flares of sheet
lightning swept across the dark horizon to the east. The cabins were
deserted. Antonio and the Mexican woman were gone. The circumstances
made Ellen wonder, but she was too tired and too sunken in spirit to
think long about it or to care. She fed and watered her horse and left
him in the corral. Then, supperless and without removing her clothes,
she threw herself upon the bed, and at once sank into heavy slumber.

Sometime during the night she awoke. Coyotes were yelping, and from
that sound she concluded it was near dawn. Her body ached; her mind
seemed dull. Drowsily she was sinking into slumber again when she
heard the rapid clip-clop of trotting horses. Startled, she raised her
head to listen. The men were coming back. Relief and dread seemed to
clear her stupor.

The trotting horses stopped across the lane from her cabin, evidently
at the corral where she had left Spades. She heard him whistle.

From the sound of hoofs she judged the number of horses to be six or
eight. Low voices of men mingled with thuds and cracking of straps and
flopping of saddles on the ground. After that the heavy tread of boots
sounded on the porch of the cabin opp