w long or how insistently it beckoned, if by the hundredth
chance it should flare up beyond the shadows, but as minutes dragged
interminably by into equally interminable hours, the strained
fierceness of that whispered promise grew less and less knifelike in
its hardness--less and less assured.

Somehow, ever since the first light of that gray day had discovered
her sitting there in almost the same position in which she now sat,
eyes straining out across the valley, pointed chin cupped in her
palms, that fearful, almost insane passion which had held each nerve
and fiber of her taut as tight-stretched wire through the entire
sleepless night, had begun to give way to something even less easy to
endure.

All the terror which had checked her that evening when she swung the
door open and stood poised on the threshold, a low laugh of sheerest
delight in the costume she had worn across for him to see ready to
burst from parted lips--all the horror that had held her incapable of
motion until Denny had swung around and found her there, and lifted
his arms and attempted to speak, had given way, in the first hours
that followed, to a flaming scorn, a searing contempt for him and for
his weakness that had lost him his fight.

All through that night which followed her panic flight from the huge,
heavy-footed figure that had groped out for her, called to her, and
dropped asprawl her own small cloak in the doorway, Denny Bolton's
blood-soiled face and drunkenly reckless laugh had been with her,
feeding that rage which scorched her eyes beneath their lids--that
burned her throat and choked her.

Little drops of blood oozed out upon her lips--strangely brilliant
crimson drops against that colorless background--where her teeth sank
deep in the agony of disillusionment that made each pulse-beat a
sledge-hammer blow within her brain. Her small palms were etched blue
under the clenched fingers where the nails bit the flesh. And yet--and
yet, for all the agony of it which made her lift her blanched face
from time to time throughout the night--a face so terribly strained
that it was almost distorted--and set her gasping chokingly that she
hated him, hated him for a man who couldn't fight and keep on
fighting, even when the odds were great--when the light of that new,
dreary day had come streaking in across her half-bowed head, something
else began to take the place of all that bitterness and scorn.

And throughout the day she had still