ared before. It was that, I suppose, kept me
straight. Don't you care for me--a little, Hal?"

He rose and strode to the window. When he turned from his long look out
into the burgeoning spring she was standing silent, expectant. Like
stone she stood as he came back, but her arms went up to receive him.
Her lips melted into his, and the fire of her face flashed through every
vein.

"And afterward?" he said hoarsely.

There was triumph in her answering laughter, passion-shaken though it
was.

"Then you'll take me with you."

"But afterward?" he repeated.

Lingeringly she released herself. "Let that take care of itself. I don't
care for afterward. We're free, you and I. What's to hinder us from
doing as we please? Who's going to be any the worse for it? Oh, I told
you I was lawless. It's the Hardscrabbler blood in me, I guess."

Deep in Hal's memory a response to that name stirred.

"Somewhere," he said, "I have run across a Hardscrabbler before."

"Me. But you've forgotten."

"Have I? Let me see. It was in the old days when Dad and I were
traveling. You were the child with the wonderful red hair, the night I
was hurt. _Were_ you?"

"And next day I tried to bite you because you wanted to play with a
prettier little girl in beautiful clothes."

Esme! The electric spark of thought leaped the long space of years from
the child, Esme, to the girl, in the vain love of whom he had eaten his
heart hollow. For the moment, passion for the vivid woman-creature
before him had dulled that profounder feeling almost to obliteration.
Perhaps--so the thought came to him--he might find forgetfulness,
anodyne in Milly Neal's arms. But what of Milly, taken on such poor
terms?

The bitter love within him gave answer. Not loyalty to Esme Elliot whom
he knew unworthy, but to Milly herself, bound him to honor and
restraint; so strangely does the human soul make its dim and perilous
way through the maze of motives. Even though the girl, now questing his
face with puzzled, frightened eyes, asked nothing but to belong to him;
demanded no bond of fealty or troth, held him free as she held herself
free, content with the immediate happiness of a relation that, must end
in sorrow for one or the other, yet he could not take what she so
prodigally, so gallantly proffered, with the image of another woman
smiling through his every thought. That, indeed, were to be unworthy,
not of Esme, not of himself, but of Milly.

He made a step towa