es again met hers, the sight of her and the sound of her
voice brought overpoweringly upon him a surge of that feeling which he
had been trying to repress.

They had met thus far as two duellists may meet, each testing the blade
of his will and studying the eye of the adversary where may be read the
coming thrust in advance of its attempted delivery.

Consciously Anne had admitted that wariness and determination. Boone had
chosen to regard her merely as the woman he had once worshipped, who,
after failing of loyalty, was making a theatric effort in his behalf,
inspired by a sentimental memory of a dead love.

Now he recognized with a disturbing certainty that to try to think of
her in any past tense of love was worse than hypocritical. He knew that
to him she had never seemed more incredibly beautiful than at this
moment when she stood there in the rough corduroy riding clothes in
which she had crossed the hills. Those eyes, with the amazing inner
lights, were to him dazzling and unsteadying.

"What you have just told me is what you meant to do," she declared, with
the sort of calm assurance that can speak without faltering or misgiving
against the howl of the furies, "but you aren't going to do it. You
_couldn't_ do it, except in a moment of delirium--"

Boone's chest heaved with a spasm of agitation that made his breath a
struggle. Until tonight he had not seen her since they had separated in
Colonel Wallifarro's library in Louisville. The world had been desolate.
Now she seemed to fill it with Tantalus allurement, and they stood in a
battle of wills with a dead man lying between them--and the dead man had
been murdered for him.

"Why do you care," he demanded, with a fierce outburst of hungry
emotion, "what I do? What are the lives of these human snakes to you?"

Anne's chin came up a little.

"Nothing," she declared crisply. "Perhaps death is too good for them;
but murder's not good enough for you!"

He leaned forward toward her with an avid eagerness in his eyes, and
abruptly his voice shook as he stubbornly repeated his question:

"I was asking you why--so far as I'm concerned--you care?"

The curt interrogation, with the throb of the restraint in the voice
that put it, brought to Anne that same feeling of exaltation that had
come when he had seized her so vehemently in his arms in the bluegrass
garden on a June morning. Even now she could sway him if only she let a
touch of the responsiveness that cla