appeals. I know nothing about it. I have only my woman's
heart, but my woman's heart knows you. There is no guilt in you--there
never has been. You have tortured yourself because you look like a man
whose name is Carter."

She said it all so positively, so much with the manner of a decree
from the supreme bench, that, for a moment, the ghosts of hope began
to rise and gather in the man's brain; for a moment, he forgot that
this was not really the final word.

He had crucified himself in the recital to make it easier for her to
abandon him. He had told one side only, and she had seen only the
force of what he had left unsaid. If that could be possible, it might
be possible she was right. With the reaction came a wild momentary
joyousness. Then, his face grew grave again.

"I had sworn by every oath I knew," he told her, "that I would speak
no word of love to you until I was no longer anonymous. I must go to
Puerto Frio at once, and determine it."

Her arms tightened about his neck, and she stood there, her hair
brushing his face as though she would hold him away from everything
past and future except her own heart.

"No! no!" she passionately dissented. "Even if you were the man, which
you are not, you are no more responsible for that dead life than for
your acts in some other planet. You are mine now, and I am satisfied."

"But, if afterward," he went on doggedly, "if afterward I should awake
into another personality--don't you see? Neither you nor I, dearest,
can compromise with doubtful things. To us, life must be a thing clean
beyond the possibility of blot."

She still shook her head in stubborn negation.

"You gave yourself to me," she said, "and I won't let you go. You
won't wake up in another life. I won't let you--and, if you do--" she
paused, then added with a smile on her lips that seemed to settle
matters for all time--"that is a bridge we will cross when we come to
it--and we will cross it together."

CHAPTER VIII

When he reached the cabin, Saxon found Steele still awake. The gray
advance-light of dawn beyond the eastern ridges had grown rosy, and
the rosiness had brightened into the blue of living day when an early
teamster, passing along the turnpike, saw two men garbed in what he
would have called "full-dress suits," still sitting over their cigars
on the verandah of the hill shack. A losing love either expels a man
into the outer sourness of resentment, or graduates him into a
frien