it! Why, down in Tulare--" His
voice fell away as though he recognized the futility of an attack in
this form. She spoke:

"It is you who should not expect it." And then, "I am sorry I said
what I did. It was an impulse. We are all imperfect. I've often been
unkind myself."

Bertram stood gripping the rail before him as one caught and held by a
new emotion. When he spoke, his voice was low and rather hard. At the
first tone of it, she shrank from the daimon in him.

"If you only cared enough to call me down! That's the trouble with
you. Am I--am I the dirt under your feet?"

"Oh, don't please!" But he was going on, too fast to be stopped.

"I'm afraid of you--that's what's the matter. What have you got in you
that I can't seem to melt? You kept away from me the first time ever
I saw you. You've kept away ever since. You don't think I'm as good as
you--and I'm not. But it's aggravating--it's damned aggravating--to
have you rub it in. You've got something about you that I can't touch
anywhere." And he paused, as though expecting her to deny it.

"I don't know what right you have to say this," she exclaimed.

In her swift rush to her own defence, she had dropped her guard. She
realized it on the moment, heard his inevitable reply before he opened
his mouth to the swift-flashing answer which, that outer self told
her, was the only possible answer for him to make.

"Only this right. I'm in love with you. I've been in love with you
ever since I saw you down at the Judge's ranch, only I didn't know it
then. I love you." Silence for a moment, and then, "I love you!"

For just one instant, it seemed to her that she was swaying toward him
in spite of herself. He made, curiously, no active motion toward her.
That outer self of Eleanor's, reigning as always over her conscious
self, commenting, criticising, seeing--that outer self remembered,
above her mental turmoil, that never in all their later acquaintance
had he tried even to touch her finger.

"Oh, don't!" she cried, "please don't!"

He made a growl in his throat, the adult counterpart to a baby's cry
of disappointment.

"Didn't I tell you?" he said, "and now I've laid myself wide open for
a throw-down."

"If you call it that. Oh Bertram--" he and she both noticed the shift
to his familiar name--"I'm afraid I haven't been fair to you. Oh, have
I been fair?"

He paused as though considering a whole new range of ideas.

"Yes, I guess you have," he responded at