refuse to give you away. She did, didn't she?"

"Most emphatically, she did not," he denied. "You have greatly misjudged
Miss Farnham. The reason--the only reason--why she did not tell Broffin
what he wanted to know was a purely conventional one. She did not want
to be the most-talked-of woman in Wahaska."

His companion's laugh was not pleasant.

"I'd rather be a spiteful little cat, which is what she once called me,
than to be moth-eaten on the inside, like that!" she commented. Then she
went on: "With Miss Farnham out of it--and I knew she must be out of
it, since Broffin didn't strike--there was still Mr. Galbraith. You
didn't know why I was so anxious to have you get acquainted with him,
but you know now. And it worked. When Broffin asked him to identify you,
he couldn't--or wouldn't. Then came that unlucky drowning accident."

Griswold nodded slowly. "Yes, Mr. Galbraith knows me now."

"He doesn't!" she exulted. "He is a dear old saint, and he will never
know you again as the man who held him up. Listen: he sent for Broffin
this afternoon, and gave him a new commission--something about bonds in
California. And he told him he must go on the first train!"

Once more the castaway was running the gamut of the fiercely varying
emotions.

"Let me understand," he said. "You knew I had taken the money, and yet
you did all these things to pull me out and make the hold-up a success.
Where was your moral sense, all this time, little girl?"

She made a charming little mouth at him.

"I am _Joan_, and the _Joans_ don't have any moral senses--to speak
of--do they? That's the way you are writing it down in your book, isn't
it?" Then, with a low laugh that sounded some unfathomed depth of loving
abandonment: "It was a game; and I played it--played it for all I was
worth, and won. You are free; free as the air, Kenneth, boy. If Broffin
should come here this minute and put his hand on your shoulder, you
could look up and laugh in his face. Are you glad--or sorry?"

His answer was the answer of the man who was, for the time being,
neither the moralist nor the criminal. With a swift out-reaching he drew
her to him, crushed her in his arms, covered her face with kisses.

"I am glad--glad that I am your lover," he whispered, passionately.
"God, girl! but you are a woman to die for! No, not yet"--when she would
have slipped out of his arms--"Believe me, Margery; there has never been
any one else--not for a moment. But I thou