e had given him had astonished him. His manner
betrayed perturbation as he replied in short, jerky sentences: "You
amaze me! What you say is--most astonishing. Are you sure? You have not
dreamed this by any chance?"

"If I have," answered Helen, "another shared my dream. For when I heard
the shots I thought that Mr. Stane had fired them; it was the
half-breed who told me that I was mistaken, and that the shots had been
fired by some one in the forest."

Ainley's perturbation did not subside at this further information.
There was in his face a look of agitation that amounted almost to
apprehension. "I do not understand it at all," he said, more to himself
than to Helen. "It is beyond me. Good Heavens! Is it possible that
Stane escaped after all? He----"

"I thought one of your men saw his body?" interrupted Helen, quickly.

"He certainly saw the body of a white man, or so he avers, and I had no
reason to suppose that it could be any one else!"

"Then," said the girl, "you are not sure?"

"No, not in the sense you mean; but I am morally certain that--but why
worry about Stane? Dead or alive he can be nothing to you."

The girl turned to him sharply, and there was a flash in her eyes and a
look on her face that startled him.

"Dead or alive," she said quickly, "he is more to me than you ever can
be!"

"Helen!" there was a note of angry protest in Ainley's voice. "You
cannot think what you are saying. You must have forgotten how I love
you."

"No," answered the girl deliberately. "I have not forgotten."

"Then you are forgetting what I have endured for you--all the toil and
travail of these weeks of search--the risks I have taken to find you,
the risks I took this morning. Stane may have done something heroic in
saving you from the river, I don't know, but I do know that, as you
told me months ago, you were a hero-worshipper, and I beg of you not to
be misled by a mere romantic emotion. I have risked my life a score of
times to serve you. This morning I saved you from something worse than
death, and surely I deserve a little consideration at your hands. Will
you not think again? Since heroism is your fetish, can you find nothing
heroic in my labours, in my service?"

The man was in deadly earnest, pleading for something on which his
heart was set, and whatever dissimulation there had been in his
narrative, there was none whatever in his pleadings. But Helen
remembered how her lover had gone to prison for this