moured in her find expression, but
she had come in answer to a more austere summons. Between them as lovers
who had irreparably quarrelled matters stood unchanged, and she was not
here to fight emotion with emotion. She had come to draw him back, if
she could, from the edge of disaster. Incidentally--for to her just then
it seemed quite incidental--she was engaged to marry Morgan Wallifarro.

"I care," she said, rather weakly and conscious of the ring of platitude
in her words, "because of the past--because we are--old friends."

Boone's face darkened again into clouded disappointment; then he looked
down, jerking his head toward the cot, and demanded shortly:

"All right. I was a fool, of course, but how about him?"

"Will he sleep easier because you prove a deserter to the cause to which
you swore allegiance?" There was a touch of scorn in her voice now.
"Does his rest depend on your punishing one murder with another?"

"We're talking two languages," he retorted, and the upflaring of his
lover's hope had left him, in its quenching, inflexible. "Our standards
are as far apart as the Koran and the Bible."

"Neither of them exalts the coward," came her swift response. "Any
agitator could lash the Gregories into mob-violence tonight. Only one
man might have the courage--and the strength--to hold them in leash."

Boone set down the heavy box and came out into the room where the fire
burned. He seemed, in his white-hot anger, too distrustful of himself
for speech, and, perhaps because he loved her so unconquerably and
despairingly, his fury against her was the greater.

"Before Almighty God," he declared, in a voice low and quaking with
passion, "I think I can understand how some men kill the women they
love! Call me a barbarian if you like. I am one. Call me a renegade from
your self-complacent culture. I welcome the impeachment, but don't call
me a coward, because that's a lie."

He broke off; then burst out again in a mounting voice:

"Until a little while ago I might have yielded to everything you asked,
because the fear of offending you was a mightier thing to me than
everything else combined. But that was the infirmity of a man weakened
by love--not strengthened. I've regained my strength now, and I mean to
keep it. Hate is a stronger god than love!"

Remaining stiff-postured on the hearth, Boone rained upon her the wrath
that cumulative incitements had kindled and fed to something like mania,
and she met i