withdrew
it and stepped back from him.

"You must first understand before you offer yourself," she said. "I
cannot tell you what my trouble is. You will never know. And when it is
over, when you have helped me across the abyss, then will come the
greatest trial of all for you. I believe--when I tell you that last
thing which you must do--that you will regard me as a monster, and draw
back. But it is necessary. If you fight for me, it must be in the dark.
You will not know why you are doing the things I ask you to do. You may
guess, but you would not guess the truth if you lived a thousand years.
Your one reward will be the knowledge that you have fought for a woman,
and that you have saved her. Now, do you still want to help me?'

"I can't understand," he gasped. "But--yes--I would still accept the
inevitable. I have promised you that I will do as you have dreamed that
knights of old have done. To leave you now would be"--he turned his
head with a gesture of hopelessness--"an empty world forever. I have
told you now. But you could not understand and believe unless I did. I
love you."

He spoke as quietly and with as little passion in his voice as if he
were speaking the words from a book. But their very quietness made them
convincing. She started, and the colour left her face. Then it
returned, flooding her cheeks with a feverish glow.

"In that is the danger," she said quickly. "But you have spoken the
words as I would have had you speak them. It is this danger that must
be buried--deep--deep. And you will bury it. You will urge no questions
that I do not wish to answer. You will fight for me, blindly, knowing
only that what I ask you to do is not sinful nor wrong. And in the
end--"

She hesitated. Her face had grown as tense as his own.

"And in the end," she whispered, "your greatest reward can be only the
knowledge that in living this knighthood for me you have won what I can
never give to any man. The world can hold only one such man for a
woman. For your faith must be immeasurable, your love as pure as the
withered violets out there among the rocks if you live up to the tests
ahead of you. You will think me mad when I have finished. But I am
sane. Off there, in the Snowbird Lake country, is my home. I am alone.
No other white man or woman is with me. As my knight, the one hope of
salvation that I cling to now, you will return with me to that
place--as my husband. To all but ourselves we shall be man and wi