hened by Gloria's helplessness, he took her into his arms,
holding her close to him.

"Why did you leave me?" asked Gloria petulantly. "So long."

He had been away from her fifteen minutes while he cut an armful of
fir-boughs, and thereafter filled and lighted his pipe--and to Gloria
the time had seemed long! Little enough of love's confession, surely,
but a golden crumb to a man's starving love. He drew her closer; their
faces, ruddy with fire-glow, each tense with its own emotion, were close
together.

"Oh!" cried Gloria. She wrenched away from him violently. "You--you hurt
me. Let me go!" She buried her face in her hands; he saw her shoulders
lift and droop; he heard her sob: "Oh, I was a fool----"

His arms had dropped to his sides and he stood for a moment speechless,
staring at her as across a chasm shadow-filled.

"Gloria," he said, bewildered.

But now her hands, too, were at her sides, clenched and nervous; her
white face was lifted and she broke out passionately into hot words; he
saw her breast heaving and sensed that she was stirred to depths never
until now plumbed. What he could not glimpse were the vague,
unreasonable reasons, the distorted horrors grinning at her among the
spaces of black gloom into which her spirit had sunk; had he been a
fancy-sick poet, a pale-blooded creature given to blue devils and
nightmare conjecture, he might have come somewhere near an
understanding. But being plain Mark King, a straightforward, healthy,
and unjaundiced man, his comprehension found never a clue to a condition
which in Gloria was hardly other than an inevitable result of all that
had gone before.

"I was half-mad last night," she panted. "There was no way to turn. That
beast of a man drove me to desperation. Then you came, and--and----Oh,
I wish that I were dead!"

Incredulous, amazed, near stupefied, he stood rooted to the ground.

"I don't understand," he said dully after a long silence broken only by
a tumble and frolic of the water and Gloria's quick, hard breathing. He
strove to be very gentle with her. "Just what is it? Can you tell me,
dear?"

"Don't call me dear ... like that," she cried sharply. "Just as though I
were your ... _property_." He saw the roundness of her eyes. She
shuddered. "You knew that I was driven to it, to save my name, to stop
hideous gossip...."

In her disordered mind she had been flung, as upon shoals, to many bleak
points of view; she had blamed fate for her undoing