ters late Thursday evening, relayed on from the Agua
Fria, after a good noonday rest in camp, and even in bidding them
welcome, welcome over again, Mrs. Crook pointed to the brightly lighted
assembly room down the winding roadway. "They're having a holiday dance
to-night," said she to Lilian. "We'll toddle down after tea and take
them all by surprise."

For three days Willett had hardly been seen at the office, where indeed
there was little for him to do, except perhaps read the letters that
had begun to come again from various quarters. He had merely slept at
home; he had simply lived at the Darrahs. He was hardly seen by any
associates except dancing attendance upon this tall, imperious beauty,
who, for her part, seemed now to accept his devotions as a matter of
course, and to be regardless of public opinion. Begun in pique, or
vanity, or devilment, whatever it may have been at the start, her
indifference at first, her coquetry, her wiles, her defiance of his
powers had spurred, fascinated and finally maddened him. Then, when she
would have drawn back, his apparent, his acted or his actual
desperation terrified her, and, all too late, her own battered heart
cried out for relief. In spite of herself she found her resolution
gone, her indifference rebuked, her strength wasted, sapped. She was
yielding to him when she meant to scorn. She was clinging to him when
she meant to spurn. And now the last night, the last of
their--flirtation had come, and as she fluttered away on his arm to
take their place in the dance, the cynosure of all eyes, Evelyn Darrah
_knew_ that she was facing her fate, that before the midnight hour she
must answer. He would so have it. Recklessly enough she had begun. What
meant such affairs to her but a laugh? Yet, only the night before, as
they stood murmuring in the shade at her father's doorway, and he was
begging for some little word, touch, token--something to bid him hope
in the hell of his despair, imploring her to see his engagement as he
saw it--a something entered into in his enfeebled condition because he
saw, everybody saw, that fair young girl's self-betrayal, and he had
mistaken gratitude, pity, tenderness for love, until he, Harold
Willett, had met _her_, Evelyn Darrah, and at last learned what it was
to love, passionately, overwhelmingly--to love, to worship, to need, to
crave, and then on a sudden she had felt herself seized in his clasp,
and before she could, if she would, tear her