ation of mail," he
said with the same Anglo-Saxon pretence of armour-plated emotion. "In
these days even the hermit doesn't altogether escape letters."

But when, inside the house, he found among the few and dusty envelopes
one containing a wedding invitation, and when his eyes went,
quick-glancing, to the wall calendar in a comparison of dates, his brain
cleared of its mystification.

Tomorrow was the day of Anne's marriage.

If the number twelve on the calendar's June page bore a black penciling,
like a mourning band, it was palpably a thing that Boone had not meant
other eyes to see or understand.

McCalloway, himself in the shadowed interior, turned his head and could
see through the door a sweep of sun-flooded hills and flawless sky.
Against a background of blossoming laurel and crystal brightness Boone
sat, stiff-postured, with eyes fixed and unseeing. McCalloway carried
the card and its covering to the empty fireplace and touched a match to
its edge. When it had been consumed, he went out again, and the younger
man looked up, slowly, as though bringing himself out of a lethargy, and
spoke with a dull intonation.

"You have said nothing, sir, of what I told you of myself. Saul came
back and I reverted. That night I was a feud killer pure and simple. If
blood didn't flow it was only because--" He broke off and began over,
speaking with the rapidity of one rushing at an obstacle which has
balked him, "it was only because--_she_ stopped me."

"The point is," responded McCalloway soberly, "that blood didn't flow.
You threw your weight into the right pan of the scales."

Boone shrugged his shoulders, disdaining a specious justification. "The
rescue came from outside myself. One must he judged by his motive--and
by that standard I failed."

"Not at all, sir! Damn it, not at all!"

At the sudden tempestuousness of the soldier's outburst, Boone looked
up, surprised. McCalloway, too, had felt and reacted to the tension of
their interview, and now he cleared his throat self-consciously and
proceeded in a manner of recovered calmness.

"You were in the position of infantry just then, my boy, under the fire
of field pieces. You needed artillery support--and, thanks to her, it
came. There are times when no infantry can endure without a curtain of
fire."

* * * * *

"She looked as if she'd been seeing ghosts," announced Anne's
maid-of-honour, with a little shudder of emphasis, as sh