see?"

She did not reply at once, but a long sigh came from her lips. "You'll
be cold," she said.

"No, it's a hot night," he answered. "I'm too hot as it is." And he
loosened his heavy red shirt at the throat.

"If I've got to go to bed in half an hour," she said presently, "tell me
more about your Aunt Samantha, and about yourself, and your home before
you came out here, and what you did when you were a little boy--tell me
everything about yourself."

She was forgetting Tralee for the moment, and the man who raised his
hand against her yesterday, and the life she had lived. Or was it only
that she had grown young during these last two months, and the young can
so easily forget!

"You want to hear? You really want to hear?" he asked. "Say, it won't
be a very interesting story. Better let me tell you about the
broncho-busting today."

"No, I want to hear about yourself." She looked intently at him for an
instant, and then her eyes closed and the long lashes touched her cheek.
There was something very wilful in her beauty, and her body too
had delicate, melancholy lines strange in one so young. She was not
conscious that, in her dreamy abstraction, she was leaning towards him.

It was but an instant, though it seemed to him an interminable time, in
which he fought the fierce desire to clasp her in his arms, and kiss
the lips which, to his ears, said things more wonderful than he had ever
dreamed of in his friendship with the night and the primrose moon.
He knew, however, that if he did, she would not go back to Tralee
to-morrow; that tomorrow she would defy the leviathan; and that tomorrow
he would not have the courage to say the things he must say to the
evil-hearted master of Tralee, who, he knew, would challenge them with
ugly accusations. He must be able to look old Mazarine fearlessly in the
face; he would not be the slave of opportunity. He was going to fight
clean. She was here beside him in the warm loneliness of the northern
world, and he was full-grown in body and brain, with all the human
emotions alive in him; yet he would fight clean.

Not for a half-hour, but for nearly an hour he told her what she wished
to know, while she listened in a happy dream; and when at last she lay
down, she refused his coverlet of dry grass, saying that she was quite
warm. She declared that she did not even need the coat he had taken from
the saddle of the dead horse, but he wrapped it around her, and, saying
"Goodnight