say to you."

"I suppose it is. Yet there are some things a woman likes better than
honesty. Perhaps you haven't been making love to the Cripple Creek
girl long enough to find that out. But it is so, and it always will be
so."

It was at the outer door opening that she gave me the final stab.

"I am taking your business excuse at its face value to-night and
letting you go. But the next time you come you mustn't have any
business; at least, nothing more important than entertaining me--and
that is important. Just jot that down in your little vest-pocket
memorandum, and don't allow yourself to forget it for a single moment;
not even while you are making love to Little Brown-Eyes. Good-night."

The old-fashioned preachers used to describe a terrifying hell in which
fire and brimstone and all manner of physical torments awaited the
impenitent. I was brought up to believe implicitly in such a hell, but
the puerility of it as compared with the refined tortures which I
endured that winter can never be set forth in any words of mine.

With a desire keener than the hunger of the famishing for
respectability and the privilege of living open-eyed and honestly
before all men, I was forced, from the night of that first visit to
Agatha Geddis, to lead a wretched, fear-frozen, double existence. On
my return to Cripple Creek after the interview which I have just
detailed, I swore roundly that I would stop going to the Everton's;
that, come what might, Polly should never be dragged into the horrible
morass of degradation which I saw clearly, even at that bare beginning,
was waiting to engulf me.

But at best, a man is only a man, human in his desires, human in his
powers of resistance; and a man in love can rarely be a complete master
of circumstances. Though I had been holding back, both for Barrett's
sake and because of my own wretched handicap, it soon became apparent
that I had gone too far to be able to retreat with honor; that Polly
Everton's name had already been coupled with mine in the gossip of the
great gold camp; and that--if what Barrett had said were true--Polly
herself had to be considered.

So the double life began and continued. In Cripple Creek I was Mary
Everton's lover; in Denver I was Agatha Geddis's bondman and slave.
Oftener and oftener, as the winter progressed, the business of the mine
took me to the capital; and Agatha never let me escape. One time it
would be a theater party, at which I woul