ing, to you is wiped away, your responsibility for
my acts relieved. Lift your head, sir. You need not blush before the
world for me!"

Sweat was springing on the major's forehead; he drew his breath
through open lips.

"I refuse to humor your caprice--you are irresponsible, you don't know
what you are doing," he declared. "You are forcing the issue to this
point, Frances, I haven't demanded this."

"You have demanded too much. You may go now, Major King."

"It's only the infatuation of a moment. You can't care for a man like
that, Frances," he argued, shaken out of his passion by her determined
stand.

"This is not a matter for discussion between you and me, sir."

Major King bowed his head as if the rebuke had crushed him. She stood
aside to let him pass. When he reached the door she turned to him. He
paused, expectantly, hopefully, as if he felt that a reconciliation
was dawning.

"If it hadn't been for you they wouldn't have discovered him last
night," she charged. "You betrayed him to his enemies. Can you tell
me, then--will you tell me--is Alan Macdonald--dead?"

Major King stood, his stern eyes on the glove, unrolled again, now
dangling in her hand.

"If he was a gentleman, as you said of him once, then he is dead,"
said he.

He turned and left her. She did not look after him, but stood with the
soiled glove spread in her hands, gazing upon it in sad tenderness.

CHAPTER VI

A BOLD CIVILIAN

Colonel Landcraft was a slight man, and short of stature for a
soldierly figure when out of the saddle. His gray hair was thinning in
front, and his sharp querulous face was seamed in frowning pattern
about the eyes. His forehead was fashioned on an intention of
massiveness out of keeping with his tapering face, which ran out in a
disappointing chin, and under the shadow of that projecting brow his
cold blue eyes seemed as unfriendly as a winter sky.

Early in his soldiering days the colonel had felt the want of inches
and pounds, a shortage which he tried to overcome by carrying himself
pulled up stiffly, giving him a strutting effect that had fastened
upon him and become inseparable from his mien. This air of superior
brusqueness was sharpened by the small fierceness of his visage, in
which his large iron-gray mustache branched like horns.

Smallness of stature, disappointment in his ambition for preferment,
and a natural narrowness of soul, had turned Colonel Landcraft into a
military martinet