the preacher, and he would have sustained you. You put certain
conditions on our marriage. I assented to them. I have respected them.
I shall continue to respect them. But--when you married me, you didn't
marry a dawdling dude chattering 'advanced ideas' with his head full
of libertinism. You married a man. And that man is your husband."

I waited, but she made no comment--not even by gesture or movement.
She simply sat, her hands interlaced in her lap, her eyes straight
upon mine.

"You say, let us be reasonable," I went on. "Well, let us be
reasonable. There may come a time when a woman can be free and
independent, but that time is a long way off yet. The world is
organized on the basis of every woman having a protector--of every
decent woman having a husband, unless she remains in the home of some
of her blood relations. There may be women strong enough to set the
world at defiance. But you are not one of them--and you know it. You
have shown it to yourself again and again in the last forty-eight
hours. Further, though you do not know it, your bringing up has made
you more of a child than most of the inexperienced women. If you tried
to assert your so-called independence, you would be the easy prey of a
scoundrel or scoundrels. When I, who have lived in the thick of the
fight all my life, who have learned by many a surprise and defeat
never to sleep except sword and gun in hand, and one eye open--when I
have been trapped as Roebuck and Langdon have just trapped me--what
chance would a woman like you have?"

She did not answer, or change expression.

"Is what I say reasonable or unreasonable?" I asked, gently.

"Reasonable--from _your_ standpoint," she said.

She gazed out into the moonlight, up into the sky. And at the look in
her face, the primeval savage in me strained to close round that
slender white throat of hers and crush and crush until it had killed
in her the thought of that other man which was transforming her from
marble to flesh that glowed and blood that surged. I pushed back my
chair with a sudden noise that startled her; by the way she trembled,
I gauged how tense her nerves must have been. I rose and, in a fairly
calm tone, said: "We understand each other?"

"Yes," she answered. "As before."

I ignored this. "Think it over, Anita," I urged--she seemed to me so
like a sweet, spoiled child again. I longed to go straight at her
about that other man. I stood for a moment with Tom Langdon's nam