you call yourself a rascal
then? Did you--"

"Stop!" he said, in a voice that shook the rafters; "I command you,
stop!"

She had gradually worked herself from a deliberately insulting precision
into an hysterical, and it is to be feared a virtuous, conviction of
her wrongs. Beginning only with the instinct to taunt and wound the man
before her, she had been led by a secret consciousness of something else
he did not know to anticipate his reproach and justify herself in a wild
feminine abandonment of emotion. But she stopped at his words. For a
moment she was even thrilled again by the strength and imperiousness she
had loved.

They were facing each other after five years of mistaken passion, even
as they had faced each other that night in her mother's kitchen. But the
grave of that dead passion yawned between them. It was Joan who broke
the silence, that after her single outburst seemed to fill and oppress
the room.

"As far as Rosita is concerned," she said, with affected calmness, "she
is going to-night. And you probably will not be troubled any longer by
your mysterious visitor."

Whether he heeded the sarcastic significance of her last sentence, or
even heard her at all, he did not reply. For a moment he turned his
blazing eyes full upon her, and then without a word strode from the
room.

She walked to the door and stood uneasily listening in the passage until
she heard the clatter of hoofs in the paved patio, and knew that he had
ordered his horse. Then she turned back relieved to her room.

It was already sunset when Demorest drew rein again at the entrance
of the corral, and the last stroke of the Angelus was ringing from
the Mission tower. He looked haggard and exhausted, and his horse was
flecked with foam and dirt. Wherever he had been, or for what object, or
whether, objectless and dazed, he had simply sought to lose himself in
aimlessly wandering over the dry yellow hills or in careering furiously
among his own wild cattle on the arid, brittle plain; whether he had
beaten all thought from his brain with the jarring leap of his horse, or
whether he had pursued some vague and elusive determination to his own
door, is not essential to this brief chronicle. Enough that when he
dismounted he drew a pistol from his holster and replaced it in his
pocket.

He had just pushed open the gate of the corral as he led in his horse
by the bridle, when he noticed another horse tethered among some cotton
woods t