her eyes in the blue
heaven? Who could tell you, when at night I stood alone under these
Western stars, how deep in my soul I was glad just to be alive, to be
able to do something for you, to be near you, to stand between you and
worry, trouble, danger, to feel somehow that I was a part, just a little
part of the West you had come to love?"

Madeline was mute. She heard her heart thundering in her ears.

Stewart leaped at her. His powerful hand closed on her arm. She
trembled. His action presaged the old instinctive violence.

"No; but you think I kept Bonita up in the mountains, that I went
secretly to meet her, that all the while I served you I was--Oh, I know
what you think! I know now. I never knew till I made you look at me.
Now, say it! Speak!"

White-hot, blinded, utterly in the fiery grasp of passion, powerless to
stem the rush of a word both shameful and revealing and fatal, Madeline
cried:

"YES!"

He had wrenched that word from her, but he was not subtle enough, not
versed in the mystery of woman's motive enough, to divine the deep
significance of her reply.

For him the word had only literal meaning confirming the dishonor in
which she held him. Dropping her arm, he shrank back, a strange action
for the savage and crude man she judged him to be.

"But that day at Chiricahua you spoke of faith," he burst out. "You said
the greatest thing in the world was faith in human nature. You said the
finest men had been those who had fallen low and had risen. You said you
had faith in me! You made me have faith in myself!"

His reproach, without bitterness or scorn, was a lash to her old
egoistic belief in her fairness. She had preached a beautiful principle
that she had failed to live up to. She understood his rebuke, she
wondered and wavered, but the affront to her pride had been too great,
the tumult within her breast had been too startlingly fierce; she could
not speak, the moment passed, and with it his brief, rugged splendor of
simplicity.

"You think I am vile," he said. "You think that about Bonita! And all
the time I've been... I could make you ashamed--I could tell you--"

His passionate utterance ceased with a snap of his teeth. His lips set
in a thin, bitter line. The agitation of his face preceded a convulsive
wrestling of his shoulders. All this swift action denoted an inner
combat, and it nearly overwhelmed him.

"No, no!" he panted. Was it his answer to some mighty temptation? Then,
like