be either
no Bas Rowlett to bind or no Parish Thornton to seek to bind him.

Then he rode home.

Thornton entered his own house silently, but with the face of an
avenging spirit, and it was a face that told his story.

The rigid pose and the set jaw, the irreconcilable light in the eyes,
were all things that Dorothy understood at once and without explanation.
As she looked at her husband she thought, somehow, of a falcon or eagle
poised on a bare tree-top at a precipice edge. There was the same alert
restiveness as might have marked a bird of prey, gauging the blue
sky-reaches with predatory eye, and ready to strike with a winged bolt
of death.

Quietly, because the baby had just fallen asleep, she rose and laid the
child on the bright patterned coverlet of the fourposter, and she
paused, too, to brace herself with a glance into the cool shadows and
golden lights of the ample branches beyond the window.

Then she came back to the door and her voice was steady but low as she
said, "Ye've done found out who did hit. I kin read thet in yore eyes,
Ken."

He nodded, but until he had crossed the room and laid a hand on each of
her shoulders, he did not speak.

"Since ther fust day I ever seed ye, honey," he declared with a sort of
hushed fervour, "standin' up thar in ther winder, my heart hain't nuver
struck a beat save ter love ye--an' thet war jest erbout a y'ar ago."

"Hit's been all my life, Ken," she protested. "Ther time thet went ahead
of thet didn't skeercely count atall."

Her voice trembled, and the meeting of their gaze was a caress. Then he
said: "When I wedded with ye out thar--under thet old tree--with ther
sun shinin' down on us--I swore ter protect ye erginst all harm."

"Hain't ye always done thet, Ken?"

"Erginst all ther perils I knowed erbout--yes," he answered, slowly,
then his tone leaped into vehemence. "But I didn't suspicion--until
terday--thet whilst I was away from ye--ye hed ter protect yoreself
erginst Bas Rowlett."

"Bas Rowlett!" the name broke from her lips with a gasp and a spasmodic
heart-clutch of panic. Her well-kept secret stood unveiled! She did not
know how it had come about, but she realized that the time of reckoning
had come and, if her husband's face was an indication to be trusted,
that reckoning belonged to to-day and would be neither diverted nor
postponed.

Her old fear of what the consequence would be if this revelation came to
his knowledge rose chokingly and o