with moisture-beaded temples, when they had
reached a spot remote enough to assure their being undisturbed, "I
reckon I don't need to tell you that I haven't slept much since I saw
you. I haven't been able to do anything at all except--just think about
it."

"I've thought about it--a good deal--too," was her simple response, and
Boone forced himself on, rowelling his lagging speech with a determined
will power.

"I see now--that I didn't act like a man. I ought to have told you long
ago--that I--that my heart was just burning up--about Anne."

"I reckon I ought to have guessed it.... I'd heard hints."

"It seemed a slavish hard thing to write," he confessed heavily. "I
tried it--more than once--but when I read it over it sounded so
different from what I meant to say that--" There he paused, and even had
she been inclined to visit upon him the maximum instead of the minimum
of blame, there was no escaping his sincerity or the depth of his
contrition. "That, until I saw you--night before last--I didn't have any
true idea--how much you cared."

"I didn't aim that you ever should--have any idea."

"Happy," he rose and with the blood receding from his skin looked down
at her, as she sat there in the moonlight, "Happy, it seems like I never
knew you--really--until now."

She was, in her quietly borne distress, an appealing picture, and the
hands that lay in her lap had the unmoving stillness of wax--or death.

It had to be said, so he went on. "I never realized before now how fine
you are--or how much too good you are for me. I've come over here
tonight to ask you to marry me--if it ain't too late."

The girl flinched as if she had been struck. Not even for a moment did
her eagerness betray her into the delusion that this proposal was
anything other than a merciful effort to soothe a hurt for which he felt
himself blamable.

Just as she had meant to keep from him the extent of her heart's
bruising, so he was seeking now to make amends at the cost of all his
future happiness. Having blundered, he was tendering what payment lay in
possibility.

"No, Boone," she said firmly. "We'd both live in hell for always--unless
we loved each other--so much that nothin' else counted."

"I've got to be honest," he miserably admitted. "It wouldn't be fair to
you not to be. I've got to go on loving her--while there's life in me, I
reckon--loving her above all the world. But she's young--and there'll be
lots of men of her own ki