then
a pause, and the door opened. Stewart stood bareheaded in the
sunlight. Madeline remembered with a kind of shudder the tall form, the
embroidered buckskin vest, the red scarf, the bright leather wristbands,
the wide silver-buckled belt and chaps. Her glance seemed to run
over him swift as lightning. But as she saw his face now she did not
recognize it. The man's presence roused in her a revolt. Yet something
in her, the incomprehensible side of her nature, thrilled in the look of
this splendid dark-faced barbarian.

"Mr. Stewart, will you please come in?" she asked, after that long
pause.

"I reckon not," he said. The hopelessness of his tone meant that he knew
he was not fit to enter a room with her, and did not care or cared too
much.

Madeline went to the door. The man's face was hard, yet it was sad, too.
And it touched her.

"I shall not tell my brother of your--your rudeness to me," she began.
It was impossible for her to keep the chill out of her voice, to speak
with other than the pride and aloofness of her class. Nevertheless,
despite her loathing, when she had spoken so far it seemed that kindness
and pity followed involuntarily. "I choose to overlook what you did
because you were not wholly accountable, and because there must be no
trouble between Alfred and you. May I rely on you to keep silence and
to seal the lips of that priest? And you know there was a man killed or
injured there last night. I want to forget that dreadful thing. I don't
want it known that I heard--"

"The Greaser didn't die," interrupted Stewart.

"Ah! then that's not so bad, after all. I am glad for the sake of your
friend--the little Mexican girl."

A slow scarlet wave overspread his face, and his shame was painful to
see. That fixed in Madeline's mind a conviction that if he was a heathen
he was not wholly bad. And it made so much difference that she smiled
down at him.

"You will spare me further distress, will you not, please?" His hoarse
reply was incoherent, but she needed only to see his working face to
know his remorse and gratitude.

Madeline went back to her room; and presently Florence came for her, and
directly they were sitting at breakfast. Madeline Hammond's impression
of her brother's friend had to be reconstructed in the morning light.
She felt a wholesome, frank, sweet nature. She liked the slow Southern
drawl. And she was puzzled to know whether Florence Kingsley was pretty
or striking or unusual. S