the gloom before his
eyes--"to have kept the knowledge from!"

"I lost it," said he, drawing himself up as if to withstand a blow,
"and in this hour I can plead no mitigation. A man should have put his
life down for it."

"It might have been expected--of a man," said she.

"But I ask you not to borrow trouble over the circumstance of its
return to you, Miss Landcraft," he said, cold now in his word, and
lofty. "You dropped it on the ballroom floor or in the garden path,
and I, the cattle thief, found it and carried it away, to show it as
evidence of a shadowy conquest, maybe, among my wild and lawless kind.
Beyond that you know nothing--you lost it, that was all."

In the door he turned.

"Good-bye, Mr. Macdonald," she said.

"If time and events prove so unkind to me that I never come to a
vindication in this country," he said, "just go on thinking of me as a
thief and a wild rider, and a man of the night. Good-bye, Miss
Landcraft."

She closed the door, and stood cooling from her sudden resentment at
seeing him there alive when her heart had told her that he must be
lying dead in the dust of the river trail. She should not have been so
suddenly resentful, she now believed. Perhaps there were mitigating
circumstances which he would not stoop to explain unasked. Her heart
bounded with the thought; warm blood came spreading in her cheeks.

But Alan Macdonald was gone; misjudged and unjustly condemned, she now
believed, remorse assailing her. Now the fault could not be repaired,
for he was not the man to come back. But there was much in knowing
that she had not been mistaken in the beginning; comfort and pride in
the full knowledge that he was a _man!_ Only a man would have come,
bravely and sincerely, in that manner to her father; only a man would
have put his hurt behind him like that and marched away from her, too
proud to stoop to the mean expedient of begging her to allow him to
explain.

She sighed as she turned back into the room where the colonel sat at
his desk, but her cheek was hot, her bosom agitated by an uplifting of
pride. The colonel turned, with inquiring impatience, a letter in his
hand.

"He is gone," she said.

"Very well," he nodded, shortly.

"I have just come back to tell you, father, that I have broken my
engagement with Major King, to--"

"Impossible! nonsense!"

"To save you embarrassment in your future relations with him," she
concluded, unshaken.

The colonel was standing n