ed gasps, which she struggled to subdue. Her face that
five minutes before had been so creamily, placidly composed was now hotly
red; her eyes shone with angry, unshed tears.

Gordon's lips formed a silent exclamation ... Buckley evidently had made
an error in judgment. Lettice stepped out into the road, and, plainly
unwilling to encounter the questioning eyes in the stage, walked rigidly
beside Gordon. Behind the obvious confusion, the hurt surprise of her
countenance, an unexpected, dormant quality had been stirred into being.
The crimson flood in her cheeks had stained more than her clear skin--it
had colored her gracile and candid girlhood so that it would never again
be pellucid; into it had been spilled some of the indelible dye of woman.

Gordon Makimmon gazed with newly-awakened interest at Lettice; for the
first time he thought of her as other than a school-girl; for the first
time he discovered in her the potent, magnetic, disturbing quality of sex.
Buckley Simmons had clumsily forced it into consciousness. A fleeting,
unformulated regret enveloped him in the shadow of its melancholy, an
intangible, formless sorrow at the swift passage of youth, the inevitable
lapse of time. A mounting anger at Buckley possessed him ... she had been
in his, Gordon Makimmon's, care. The anger touched his pride, his
self-esteem, and grew cold, deliberate: he watched with a contracted jaw
for Simmons' appearance.

"Why," he exclaimed, in a lowered voice, "that lown tore your pretty
shirtwaist!"

"He had no reason at all," she protested; "it was just horrid." A little
shiver ran over her. "He ... he held me and kissed ... hateful."

"I'll teach him to keep his kissing where it's liked," Gordon proclaimed.
His instinctively theatrical manner diminished not a jot the menace of the
threat.

"Oh! please, please don't fight." She turned a deeply concerned
countenance upon him. "That would hurt me very much more--"

"It won't be a fight," he reassured her, "only a little hint, something
for Buck to think about. No one will know." He could not resist adding,
"Most people go a good length before fighting with me."

"I have heard that you are awfully--" she hesitated, then, "brave."

"It was 'ugly' you heard," he quickly supplied the pause. "But that's not
true; I don't fight like some men, just for a good time. Why, in the towns
over the West Virginia line they fight all night; they'll fight--kill each
other--for two bits, or a d