uddenly toward him, with flushed face and sparkling eyes.

"You dare me?" she demanded, her voice quivering.

"I dare you!" he answered gleefully.

"Well then, he shall tell me!"

"Good!" he exclaimed. "And I'll be around to take the kicks if he--"

"Oh, Cousin Seth!" cried Marion, leaping to her feet.

The bedroom door had opened, and Huntington came out, dressed in his
familiar corduroy suit, but with his left arm still bandaged to his
side, Smythe hastened forward to greet him.

CHAPTER VI

THE STORY OF THE SCAR

She was awakened by the shrill chatter of the magpies in the tall pine
near her window. Often she had resented their quarrelsome dialogue at
dawn, but now she slipped eagerly out of bed, and hurried to the
window. There had been rain in the night, but when she had pulled
apart the chintz curtains and opened the wooden shutters the air was
sweet and clean in her face, and the thin light showed the world
rising joyously to the day.

She dressed hastily in her oldest clothes, stole on tiptoe to the
kitchen for a biscuit and a glass of milk, found fishing tackle on the
veranda, and was soon running breathlessly past the corrals toward the
banks of the Brightwater. And all this was a deliberate deception. She
purposed to fish, of course--a little, to justify the clandestine
expedition; but what she really sought was solitude.

It was half in jest that she had said to Smythe, "He shall tell me!"
But in the night, by some strange alchemy, that jest had been
transmuted into a purpose of which she was still doubtful, if not
afraid. And yet to go forward seemed less difficult than to go back.
For she had let the days of Seth's recovery and convalescence slip by
without telling Claire of her experience in the Forbidden Pasture and
on the road to Paradise. The duel at the post-office, she argued,
surely had made it unnecessary to warn Huntington of Haig's anger. And
yet, as their guest, as Claire's cousin--But had they been quite fair
to her? They had not warned her of the hostility across the Ridge;
they had let her go blundering into the Forbidden Pasture; not that it
mattered so much, though it might have been worse--

Her thoughts were becoming very much confused. She had permitted a man
to treat her most offensively, and she had seen him shoot down another
without compunction; and that other was her cousin, in whose house she
was a guest. And yet she felt no resentment, no detestation, no
cen