have headache so much--or
did have. I'm getting much better, out here! I've hardly felt like the
same person, the last two or three weeks."

"You have got to show me where you're any better _acting_," Vic pointed
out, with the merciless candor of beauty's young brother. "It sure ain't
your disposition that's improved, I can tell you those."

"And with those few remarks you can close," Helen May retorted gleefully,
hurrying off to get the headache tablet. It was just a headache, poor
fellow! He wasn't peeved at all, and nothing was wrong!

It was astonishing how her mood had lightened in the past two minutes.
She got him a glass of water to help the tablet down his throat, and
stood close beside him while he swallowed it and thanked her, and began
to make some show of eating his breakfast. She was, in fact, the same
whimsically charming Helen May he had come to care a great deal for.

That made things harder than ever for Starr. If the tablet had been
prescribed for heartache rather than headache, Starr would have swallowed
thankfully the dose. The murder, over against the other line of hills,
had not seemed to him so terrible as those sheets of scribbled paper
locked away inside Helen May's desk. The grief of Estan's mother over her
dead son was no more bitter than was Starr's grief at what he believed
was true of Helen May. Indeed, Starr's trouble was greater, because he
must mask it with a smile.

All through breakfast he talked with her, looked into her eyes, smiled at
her across the table. But he was white under his tan. She thought that
was from his headache, and was kinder than she meant to be because of
it; perhaps because of her dream too, though she was not conscious of any
change in her manner.

Starr could have cursed her for that change, which he believed was a sly
attempt to win him over and make him forget anything he may have read on
those pages. He would not think of it then; time enough when he was away
and need not pretend or set a guard over his features and his tongue. The
hurt was there, the great, incredible, soul-searing hurt; but he would
not dwell upon what had caused that hurt. He forced himself to talk and
to laugh now and then, but afterwards he could not remember what they had
talked about.

As soon as he decently could, he went away again into the howling wind
that had done him so ill a turn. He did not know what he should do; this
discovery that Helen May was implicated had set him