re
standing in the presence of dammed-up emotions which might at any moment
break over and inundate us. She might yet have no realization of it, but
I knew by an occult assurance, in no way related to egotism, that I
could make her love me. My fable was false after all. I had already
fallen and been broken; my pinions were trailing and blood-stained.
There was yet time to save her. During our silence Weighborne opened the
door and our interview was ended.

It had lasted a few minutes, yet during their continuance I had been
several times perilously near the brink. I saw her rise and smile and
leave the room, and I caught or fancied I caught a glance from her eyes
and a miraculous curve of her lips at the threshold. The expression was
subtle and challenging, seeming to say to me, "You will tell me many
things before I am through with you." Of course, that, too, was my
disordered imagination, yet for the moment it was as though she had
actually spoken words of self-confidence and conquest. And I knew that
if I saw her again I should say many things--forbidden things.
Resentment and bitterness and utter heartache possessed me, and I heard
my host's voice in a maddeningly matter-of-fact pitch as he commented,
"Now I hope our interruptions are over."

As I went to my room at the hotel that night a telegram was handed me. I
did not at once open it. I presumed that it was from Keller, and it was
all of a piece with my grotesque ill luck that the answer should come
just after I had myself in the most painful possible way solved the
problem. In my room, however, I read, under a San Francisco date, "Name
Weighborne, not Carrington. Keller." It was evidently a telegraphic
mistake and should have read "Weighborne nee Carrington." Keller had
told me who she had been before she married Weighborne, the man whose
name, in the words of my fellow unfortunate, Bobby Maxwell, "looked well
on a check."

CHAPTER XVII

WE GO TO THE MOUNTAINS.

Weighborne was at the station on the following morning when, five
minutes before train time, I arrived. He was clad for his mountain
environment in high lace boots, corduroy breeches and flannel shirt, and
in this guise he loomed bigger and stronger of seeming than in
conventional clothing. His level, straight-gazing eyes held the cheery
satisfaction of facing, after a good breakfast, a prospect of action. He
was meanwhile willing to fill the interim of railroad travel with
conversation.