I am--er--personally responsible."

A wild idea took possession of Blair.

"And you say he was a noted desperado?" he said with nervous hesitation.

The colonel glared.

"Desperado, sir! Never! Blank it all!--a mean, psalm-singing, crawling,
sneak thief!"

And Blair felt relieved without knowing exactly why.

The next day it was known that the preacher, Gabriel Brown, had left
Laurel Spring on an urgent "Gospel call" elsewhere.

Colonel Starbottle returned that night with his friends to the county
town. Strange to say, a majority of the audience had not grasped the
full significance of the colonel's unseemly interruption, and those who
had, as partisans, kept it quiet. Blair, tortured by doubt, had a new
delicacy added to his hesitation, which left him helpless until the
widow should take the initiative in explanation.

A sudden summons from his patient at the loggers' camp the next
day brought him again to the fateful redwoods. But he was vexed and
mystified to find, on arriving at the camp, that he had been made the
victim of some stupid blunder, and that no message had been sent from
there. He was returning abstractedly through the woods when he was
amazed at seeing at a little distance before him the flutter of Mrs.
MacGlowrie's well-known dark green riding habit and the figure of
the lady herself. Her dog was not with her, neither was the revival
preacher--or he might have thought the whole vision a trick of his
memory. But she slackened her pace, and he was obliged to rein up
abreast of her in some confusion.

"I hope I won't shock you again by riding alone through the woods with a
man," she said with a light laugh.

Nevertheless, she was quite pale as he answered, somewhat coldly, that
he had no right to be shocked at anything she might choose to do.

"But you WERE shocked, for you rode away the last time without
speaking," she said; "and yet"--she looked up suddenly into his eyes
with a smileless face--"that man you saw me with once had a better right
to ride alone with me than any other man. He was"--

"Your lover?" said Blair with brutal brevity.

"My husband!" returned Mrs. MacGlowrie slowly.

"Then you are NOT a widow," gasped Blair.

"No. I am only a divorced woman. That is why I have had to live a lie
here. That man--that hypocrite--whose secret was only half exposed
the other night, was my husband--divorced from me by the law, when, an
escaped convict, he fled with another woman from the