nother man." Her voice
was hoarse, almost inarticulate.

Helena flung herself at Magdalena's feet. She was trembling with
excitement; but her feverish appeal for sympathy met with no response.

"That is another thing that nearly drove me wild,--that I had taken him
away from you for nothing. I know you don't care now; but you
did--perhaps you do now--sometimes I've suspected, only I wouldn't face
it--and to think that in my wretched selfishness I've separated you for
ever! For your pride wouldn't let you take him back now, and he's as
wild about me as ever: I never thought he could lose control over
himself as he did when I told him what I thought of him and beat him on
the shoulders with both my fists. He turned as white as a corpse and
shook like a leaf. Then he braced up and told me I was a little wild
cat, and that he should leave me and come back when I had come to my
senses, that he had no intention of giving me up. But he need not come
back. I'll never lay eyes on him again. While he was letting me get at
those things, I felt as if my love for him burst into a thousand pieces,
and that when they flew together again they made hate. He told me he was
used to girls of the world, who understood things; and that the girls of
California were so crude they either knew all there was to know by
experience, or else they were prudes--"

Helena paused abruptly and caught her breath. She had felt Magdalena
extend her arm and stealthily open a drawer in the bureau beside her
chair. There was nothing remarkable in the fact, for in that drawer
Magdalena kept her handkerchiefs. Nevertheless, Helena shook with the
palsy of terror; the cold sweat burst from her body. In the intense
darkness she could see nothing, only a vague patch where the face of
Magdalena was. The silence was so strained that surely a shriek must
come tearing across it. The shriek came from her own throat. She leaped
to her feet like a panther, reached the door in a bound, fled down the
hall and the stair, her eyes glancing wildly over her shoulder, and so
out to her horse. It is many years since that night, but there are
silent moments when that ride through the woods flashes down her memory
and chills her skin,--that mad flight from an unimaginable horror,
through the black woods on a terrified horse, the shadow of her fear
racing just behind with outstretched arms and clutching fingers.

Helena's sudden flight left Magdalena staring through the dark at th