d
honor and obey him as he deserves. The evidence of your guilt is
incontrovertible. I utterly disbelieve your story against him.
It is part of your sin, and it is easily to be explained in the
light of my present knowledge of your real character. Whether
you return to Morena or not, I emphatically reassert that I will
not see you or speak to you again. You are to my mind a woman of
shameless life, such a woman as I should feel justified in
turning out of any decent household.

Woodward Kane

The room turned giddily about Betty. She saw the whole roaring city
turn about her, and she knew that there was no home in it for her. She
could go to Prosper Gael, but at what horrible sacrifice of pride,
and, if Jasper now refused to bring suit, could she ask this man, who
no longer loved her, to keep her as his mistress? What could she do?
Where could she turn? How could she keep herself alive? For the first
time, life, stripped of everything but its hard and ugly bones, faced
her. She had always been sheltered, been dependent, been loved. Once
before she had lost courage and had failed to venture beyond the
familiar shelter of custom and convention. Now, she was again most
horribly afraid. Anything was better than this feeling of being lost,
alone. She looked at Jasper. At that moment he was nothing but a
protector, a means of life, and he knew it.

"Will you come home with me now?" he asked her bitterly.

Betty forced the twisted mouth to speech. "What else is there for me
to do?" she said.

CHAPTER XI

THE CLEAN WILD THING

"The Reverend Francis Holliwell." Morena turned the card over and over
in his hand. "Holliwell. Holliwell. Frank Holliwell." Yes. One of the
fellows that had dropped out. Big, athletic youngster; left college in
his junior year and studied for the ministry. Fine chap. Popular.
Especially decent to him when he had begun to play that difficult role
of a man without a country. Now here was the card of the Reverend
Francis Holliwell and the man himself, no doubt, waiting below. Jasper
tried to remember. He'd heard something about Frank. Oh, yes. The
young clergyman had given up a fashionable parish in the East--small
Norman church, wealthy parishioners, splendid stipend, beautiful stone
Norman rectory--thrown it all up to go West on some unheard-of mission
in the sagebrush. He was back now, probably for money, donations
wante