-control seemed to fly to the four winds. Swift as light she
flung herself down before Steele, against his knees, clasped her arms
round him. "Good God! Miss Sampson, you mustn't do that!" implored
Steele. He tried to break her hold with shaking hands, but he could not.

"Listen! Listen!" she cried, and her voice made Steele, and Sally and me
also, still as the rock behind us. "Hear me! Do you think I beg you to
let my father go, for his sake? No! No! I have gloried in your Ranger
duty. I have loved you because of it. But some awful tragedy threatens
here. Listen, Vaughn Steele. Do not you deny me, as I kneel here. I love
you. I never loved any other man. But not for my love do I beseech you.

"There is no help here unless you forswear your duty. Forswear it! Do
not kill my father--the father of the woman who loves you. Worse and
more horrible it would be to let my father kill you! It's I who make
this situation unnatural, impossible. You must forswear your duty. I can
live no longer if you don't. I pray you--" Her voice had sunk to a
whisper, and now it failed. Then she seemed to get into his arms, to
wind herself around him, her hair loosened, her face upturned, white and
spent, her arms blindly circling his neck. She was all love, all
surrender, all supreme appeal, and these, without her beauty, would have
made her wonderful. But her beauty! Would not Steele have been less than
a man or more than a man had he been impervious to it? She was like some
snow-white exquisite flower, broken, and suddenly blighted. She was a
woman then in all that made a woman helpless--in all that made her
mysterious, sacred, absolutely and unutterably more than any other thing
in life. All this time my gaze had been riveted on her only. But when
she lifted her white face, tried to lift it, rather, and he drew her up,
and then when both white faces met and seemed to blend in something
rapt, awesome, tragic as life--then I saw Steele.

I saw a god, a man as beautiful as she was. They might have stood,
indeed, they did stand alone in the heart of a desert--alone in the
world--alone with their love and their agony. It was a solemn and
profound moment for me. I faintly realized how great it must have been
for them, yet all the while there hammered at my mind the vital thing at
stake. Had they forgotten, while I remembered? It might have been only a
moment that he held her. It might have been my own agitation that
conjured up such swift and wh