aper office. She came to the
edge of the sidewalk as Morgan approached, leading his horse. She did
not reflect the public satisfaction from her handsome face and troubled
eyes that Ascalon in general enjoyed over Craddock's humiliation. Morgan
wondered why.

"I asked too much of you, Mr. Morgan," she said, coming at once to the
matter that clouded her honest eyes.

"You couldn't ask too much of me," he returned, with no unction of
flattery, but the cheerfully frank expression of an ingenuous heart.

"I didn't realize the disadvantage you would be under, I didn't know
what I expected of you when I urged you into this. Meeting that
desperate man with a rope instead of a gun!"

"You didn't know I was going to meet him with a rope," he said.

He stood before her, hat in hand, wholesomely honest in his homely
ruggedness, a flush of embarrassment tinging his face. The sun in his
short hair seemed laughing, picking out little flecks of gold as mica
flakes in the sea waves turn and flash.

"You might have been killed! When I saw him throw his hand to his gun!
Oh! it was terrible!"

"So you're the editor now?" he said, cheerfully, trying to turn her from
this disturbing subject.

"My heart jumped clear out of my mouth when you threw your rope!"

"It came over and helped me," he said, in manner sincere and grave.

A little flame of color lifted in her pale cheek. She looked at the
dusty road, her hand pressed to her bosom as if to make certain that the
truant heart had come back to her like a dove to its cote out of the
storm. She looked up presently, and smiled a bit; looked down again, the
hot blood writing a confession in her face.

"I hope it did," she said.

Morgan felt himself in such a suffocation of strange delight he could
find no word that seemed the right word, and left it to silence, which,
perhaps was best. He looked at the road, also, as if he would search
with her there for grains of gold, or for lost hearts which leap out of
maidens' breasts, in the white dust marked by many feet.

Together they looked up, faces white, breath faltering on dry lips. So
the fire leaps in a moment such as this and enwraps the soul. It is no
mystery, it is no process of long distillation. In a moment; so.

"Here are his guns," said he, his voice trembling as if it strained in
leaping the subject that lay in its door to go back to the business of
the day.

"His guns!" she repeated after him, shuddering at the thought.