e. For the sake of all concerned--you, the Briscoes, _les
convenances_, myself--I could not run away at the sight of you, like a
whipped hound! But I perceive my error. I will get out of this forthwith.
Heaven knows it has been anything but a pleasure!"

"Don't let me stand between you and your friends," she sobbed, weeping
now in the reaction of sentiment. "Don't let me drive you away."

"Why not?" He sought relief from the pressure of the circumstances by
affecting a lighter tone. "By your own account, you have stampeded three
men this afternoon. I shall be the fourth! The fugitives are counting up
like Falstaff's 'rogues in buckram.' Are you ready to go now? We are
leaving Mrs. Briscoe alone."

He did not offer to assist her to rise. Somehow, he could resist aught,
all, save the touch of that little hand. It brought back to him as
nothing else the girl he had loved, and who had loved him. Oh, he was
sure of it once! This woman was a changeling in some mystic sort--the
same in aspect, yet how alien to his ideal of yore!

She did not seem to mark the lapse of courtesy. She sat still, with her
broad gray hat tilted back on her head, a soft and harmonious contrast
with her golden hair and roseate face. Her ungloved hands were clasped in
her lap, her eyes were melancholy, meditative, fixed on the distant
mountains. "I wish we might reach some mutual calm thought of the past,
like the tranquil unimpassioned brightness of the close of this troubled,
threatening day. We don't care now for the clouds that overcast the
morning. To attain some quiet sentiment of forgiveness----"

"_I_ ask no pardon," he said curtly.

"Oh!"--she gazed up at him with all her soul in her eyes--"_you_ have no
need!"

Had she been warned in a dream, she could have compassed no surer method
of reducing his pride than this self-abnegating generosity. But suddenly
an alien sound impinged on the quietude. The sharp note of a rifle
shattered the silence, the fragmentary echoes clamoring back from the
rocks like a volley of musketry.

"How startling that was!" she exclaimed, turning to look in the opposite
direction over the placid valley commanded by the observatory, with the
purple mountains encircling the horizon. "How this clear air carries the
sound!"

"That was not distant," Bayne observed. "Damp air is a better conductor
of sound than a clear atmosphere."

"It was like blasting," she submitted.

"It was a rifle-shot," he discriminated.