hat you'd think over
it pretty seriously."

The woman at his side laughed a little, and then gave a significantly
careless shrug of her small shoulders.

"Who wouldn't?" she said, and their eyes met questioningly, in the
uncertain light.

"Women, as a rule, are timid," he said at last. "They usually prefer
the slower and safer road."

"Sometimes they get tired of it. Then, too, it isn't always safe just
because it's slow!"

It seemed to give him the opening for which he had been waiting. He
looked at her with undisguised yet calculating admiration.

"I'll wager _you_ would never be afraid of a thing, if you once got
into it, or wanted to get into it!" he cried.

She laughed again, a self-confident and reassuring little laugh.

"I've been through too many things," she admitted simply, "to talk
about being thin-skinned!"

"I knew as much!"

"Why do you say that?"

"I could see it from the first. You've got courage, and you're shrewd,
and you know the world--and you've got what's worth all the rest put
together. I mean that you're a fine-looking woman, and you've never
let the fact spoil you!"

There was no mistaking the pregnancy of the glance and question which
she next directed toward him.

"Then why couldn't you take me in with you?" she asked, with a
quiet-toned solemnity.

She had the sensations of a skater on treacherously thin ice, as she
watched the slow, cautious scrutiny of his unbetraying face. But now,
for some reason, she knew neither fear nor hesitation.

"And what if we did?" he parried temporizingly.

"Well, what if we did?--men and women have worked together before this!"

Even in the dim light that surrounded them she could notice the color
go out of his intent and puzzled face. From that moment, in some
mysterious way, she lost the last shred of sympathy for his abject and
isolated figure, and yet she was the one, she knew, who had been most
unworthy.

"And do you understand what it would imply--what it would mean?" he
asked slowly and with significant emphasis.

She could not repress her primal woman's instinct of revolt from the
thoughts which his quiet interrogation sent at her, like an arrow. But
she struggled to keep down the little shudder which woke and stirred
within her. He had done nothing more than respond to her tacit
challenge. But she feared him, more and more. Until then she had
advanced discreetly and guardedly, and as she had advanced and taken
her