ssort a vast mine of treasures
of the past. Of that letter Stewart had written to her brother she
saw vivid words. But ah! she had known, and if it had not made any
difference then, now it made all in the world. She recalled how her
loosened hair had blown across his lips that night he had ridden down
from the mountains carrying her in his arms. She recalled the strange
joy of pride in Stewart's eyes when he had suddenly come upon her
dressed to receive her Eastern guests in the white gown with the red
roses at her breast.

Swiftly as they had come these dreamful memories departed. There was
to be no rest for her mind. All she had thought and felt seemed only to
presage a tumult.

Heedless, desperate, she cast off the last remnant of self-control,
turned from the old proud, pale, cold, self-contained ghost of herself
to face this strange, strong, passionate woman. Then, with hands pressed
to her beating heart, with eyes shut, she listened to the ringing
trip-hammer voice of circumstance, of truth, of fatality. The whole
story was revealed, simple enough in the sum of its complicated details,
strange and beautiful in part, remorseless in its proof of great love
on Stewart's side, in dreaming blindness on her own, and, from the first
fatal moment to the last, prophetic of tragedy.

Madeline, like a prisoner in a cell, began again to pace to and fro.

"Oh, it is all terrible!" she cried. "I am his wife. His wife! That
meeting with him--the marriage--then his fall, his love, his rise,
his silence, his pride! And I can never be anything to him. Could I be
anything to him? I, Madeline Hammond? But I am his wife, and I love him!
His wife! I am the wife of a cowboy! That might be undone. Can my love
be undone? Ah, do I want anything undone? He is gone. Gone! Could he
have meant--I will not, dare not think of that. He will come back. No,
he never will come back. Oh, what shall I do?"

*****

For Madeline Hammond the days following that storm of feeling were
leaden-footed, endless, hopeless--a long succession of weary hours,
sleepless hours, passionate hours, all haunted by a fear slowly growing
into torture, a fear that Stewart had crossed the border to invite the
bullet which would give her freedom. The day came when she knew this
to be true. The spiritual tidings reached her, not subtly as so many
divinations had come, but in a clear, vital flash of certainty. Then she
suffered. She burned inwardly, and the na