de the corral; Don Diego and Clementina would join them
presently in the garden. He cast a despairing glance at the placidly
smiling Clementina, who was apparently equally indifferent to the
evident constraint and assumed ease of the man beside her, and turned
away with Mrs. Ramirez.

A silence fell upon the gallery so deep that the receding voices and
footsteps of Grant and his hostess in the long passage were distinctly
heard until they reached the end. Then Fletcher arose with an
inarticulate exclamation. Clementina instantly put her finger to her
lips, glanced around the gallery, extended her hand to him, and saying
"Come," half-led, half-dragged him into the passage. To the right
she turned and pushed open the door of a small room that seemed a
combination of boudoir and oratory, lit by a French window opening to
the garden, and flanked by a large black and white crucifix with a prie
Dieu beneath it. Closing the door behind them she turned and faced
her companion. But it was no longer the face of the woman who had been
sitting in the gallery; it was the face that had looked back at her
from the mirror at Tasajara the night that Grant had left her--eager,
flushed, material with commonplace excitement!

"'Lige Curtis," she said.

"Yes," he answered passionately, "Lige Curtis, whom you thought dead!
'Lige Curtis, whom you once pitied, condoled with and despised! 'Lige
Curtis, whose lands and property have enriched you! 'Lige Curtis, who
would have shared it with you freely at the time, but whom your father
juggled and defrauded of it! 'Lige Curtis, branded by him as a drunken
outcast and suicide! 'Lige Curtis"--

"Hush!" She clapped her little hand over his mouth with a quick but
awkward schoolgirl gesture, inconceivable to any who had known her usual
languid elegance of motion, and held it there. He struggled angrily,
impatiently, reproachfully, and then, with a sudden characteristic
weakness that seemed as much of a revelation as her once hoydenish
manner, kissed it, when she let it drop. Then placing both her hands
still girlishly on her slim waist and curtseying grotesquely before
him, she said: "'Lige Curtis! Oh, yes! 'Lige Curtis, who swore to do
everything for me! 'Lige Curtis, who promised to give up liquor for
me,--who was to leave Tasajara for me! 'Lige Curtis, who was to reform,
and keep his land as a nest-egg for us both in the future, and then
who sold it--and himself--and me--to dad for a glass of wh