idn't owe
him anything then--that was before he came."

"I respected you too much to take advantage of your coming to me that
way for your lessons day by day, Joan. I had to fight to keep it
back."

"I tried to pull it out of you," Joan said, as serious as a penitent,
although there was a smile breaking on her lips as she turned her face
away.

"I'd never want to do anything, or say anything, that would lower your
respect for me one little degree, Joan," he said, still clinging to
her hand as though he feared he had not quite won her, and must hold
her fast by his side for the final word.

"I know you wouldn't, John," said she, her voice shaking a little, and
low beneath her breath.

"I wouldn't want to--to--go as far as Jacob went that first time he
saw Rachel," said he in desperation, his grip tightening on her
fingers, sweat bursting on his brow. "I wouldn't want to--I'd _want_
to, all right, but I wouldn't even--even----"

Joan looked up at him with calm, placid eyes, with pale cheeks, with
yearning lips, a flutter in her heart that made her weak. She nodded,
anxious to help him to his climax, but not bold, not bolder than
himself, indeed, and he was shaking like a sick man in the sun.

"Unless I could make it holy, unless you could understand it so, I
wouldn't even--I wouldn't so much as----" He took her face between his
hands, and bent over her, and a glad little sob trembled between
Joan's lips as she rested her hands on his shoulders for the
benediction of his kiss.

Joan did not stay to help him bring in the sheep that day, for there
was nothing left for her to wonder over, or stand wistfully by her
saddle waiting to receive. Neither was there any sound of weeping as
she rode up the hill, for the male custom of expressing joy in that
way had gone out of fashion on the sheep ranges of this world long
before John Mackenzie's day.

Nothing that he could owe a man could equal what he had gained that
hour, Mackenzie thought, standing there with heart as light as the
down of cottonwood. With his great debt paid to Earl Reid, even to
the measure of his own life, he would still leave the world a rich
man. He had come into the fresh pastures of romance at last.

Joan waved him good-bye from the hilltop and went on, the understanding
of his fortune growing on him as he recalled her eyes in that moment
when she closed them to his salute upon her lips. She gave up that
first kiss that she ever had yielded to