un after me all this way?"

"Ran and walked. But I couldn't make much headway in the
storm--Calling out to you every few steps. I didn't know what might
have happened to you. All kinds of pictures were in my mind. You might
have been thrown and be lying hurt. In the darkness the horse might
have wandered off the road and slipped with you into the river. It
was--it was----" She felt the strong forearm that lay against her back
quiver violently. "Oh, why did you do it!" he burst out.

A strange, warm tingling crept through her.

"I--I----" Something seemed to choke her.

"Oh, why did you do it!" he repeated.

Contrary to her determination of but a little while ago, an impulse
surged up in her to tell him all she had just learned, to tell him all
her plans. She hung for a moment in indecision. Then her old attitude,
her old determination, resumed its sway.

"I had a suspicion that I might learn something about father's case,"
she said.

"It was foolishness!" he cried in fierce reproof, yet with the same
unnerved quaver in his voice. "You should have known you could find
nothing on such a night as this!"

She felt half an impulse to retort sharply with the truth. But the
thought of his stumbling all that way in the blackness subdued her
rising impulse to triumph over him. So she made no reply at all.

"You should never have come! If, when you started, you had stopped
long enough for me to speak to you, I could have told you you would
not have found out anything. You did not, now did you?"

She still kept silent.

"I knew you did not!" he cried in exasperated triumph. "Admit the
truth--you know you did not!"

"I did not learn everything I had hoped."

"Don't be afraid to acknowledge the truth!"

"You remember what I said when you were first offered the nomination
by Mr. Peck--to beware of him?"

"Yes. You were wrong. But let's not talk about that now!"

"I am certain now that I was right. I have the best of reasons for
believing that Mr. Peck intends to sell you out."

"What reasons?"

She hesitated a moment.

"I cannot give them to you--now. But I tell you I am certain he is
planning treachery."

"Your talk is wild. As wild as your ride out here to-night."

"But I tell you----"

"Let's talk no more about it now," he interrupted, brushing the matter
aside. "It--it doesn't interest me now."

There was a blinding glare of lightning, then an awful clap of thunder
that rattled in wild echoes down t