house to go to him and explain her predicament!

"I intended," she began in a low, strange voice, "to go to you, to tell
you----"

"Answer me," he said sternly. "Yes or no. Did you marry me without love
and just to save yourself from possible gossip of being alone all night
with a man? Is that why you married me? Yes or no?"

To Gloria, as to King, the issue was clear and not to be clouded; to her
credit be it said that she wasted no time in fruitless evasion. This
matter would demand settlement, as well now as later. There was wisdom
in ending all unpleasantness once and for ever.

"Yes," she answered defiantly.

Then suddenly it was given her to see a Mark King she had never dreamed
of, a Mark King of blazing wrath thrusting aside the man whom she knew
and who had held himself in check and throttled down his emotion until
she spoke that quiet "Yes." The word was like a spark to a train of
gunpowder. His determination to beat down his temper, no matter what
came, was gone; his memory of her ordeals was wiped out; from his whole
tense being there flashed out upon her a hot, heady anger, like stabbing
lightning from an ominous cloud. His few words seared and scorched a
place in her memory to endure always.

He clenched his hands and raised them; for an instant she thought he was
going to strike her down.

"You are utterly contemptible!" he shouted at her. "And I am done with
you!"

He turned and left her. Gloria stared after him in amazement. She saw
how he walked swiftly, his big boots crunching through the gravel down
by the creek bed, splashing through the water, carrying him up the
timbered slope toward the horses. She could not know that he was almost
running because he was telling himself in his fierce white passion that
unless he left her thus he would lose the last power of restraint, and
set his hands to her pink-and-white throat and choke her. Until the last
second he had sought not to condemn too soon. Now, after his fashion, he
condemned sweepingly. For the moment he held that she was less to him
than the grime upon his boots.

When he came to the horses he was white with anger; he lifted his hand
and looked at his fingers queerly; they were trembling. He cursed
himself for a fool, shut the hand into a hard fist as steady as rock,
and for an instant glared at it blackly. Then he opened the fingers
slowly; a hard smile made his mouth ugly and left it cruel; the fingers
had hearkened to a superb wil