ch put such
a world between him and the girl standing beside him. Then there was a
flash of steel, Turner felt rather than saw that it was directed at him,
and, before he even had time to think, Stanesby had sprung to his feet
and grasped her by the arm.

"Would you now? Would you?" He might have been speaking to a fractious
horse. Then as Turner too sprang to his feet and snatched the knife from
her hand, he flung her off with an oath.

"You little devil!" He sat down again with an uneasy laugh, and the girl
with an inarticulate cry flung herself out of the open door. In all
the half hour that had elapsed, she had spoken no word except when she
called them to their dinner; but in that inarticulate moan the other man
seemed to read the whole bitterness of her story.

"I told you," said Stanesby, he seemed to feel some explanation or
apology were necessary; "I told you she had the temper of a fiend. I
hope she didn't hurt you, old man?"

"No, no. She meant business, though, only you were too quick for her.
But I say, old man, it isn't well to have a good-looking young woman fix
her affections on you in that ardent manner. There'll be the devil to
pay, some day."

The other laughed, and then sighed.

"I tell you it was no fault of mine," he said.

"Come on and get something to eat. There's whisky in that bottle."

Virtually he had dismissed the subject; with the disappearance of the
girl he would have let the matter drop, but he was not at his ease, and
his old chum was less so. It was all very well to talk of old times,
of college days, of mutual friends, each was thinking, and each was
uncomfortably conscious that the other, too, was thinking, of that
dark-eyed, straight-limbed young savage who had forced her personality
upon them both, and was so far, so very far, removed from the world of
which they spoke. There was another thing too, a fair-haired,
blue-eyed girl, as different--as different as the North Pole from the
Equator--each had loved her, to each she had been the embodiment of
all earthly virtues, and each thought of her as well, too--the one
man bitterly. Why should this man, this whilom friend of his, have
everything? And the other man read his thoughts, and unreasoning anger
grew up in his heart against his old chum. It has nothing whatever to do
with Dick Stanesby's hutkeeper, of course, nothing whatever; but it is
nevertheless a fact, that these two old friends spent what should have
been a plea