She stopped, and he made a gesture.

“Yes, if I don’t?  What will happen then?”

“I shall be forced to the inevitable,” she said.  “It is rather unusual, isn’t it, to be asking for one’s life?  But that is what I mean.”

“I’m afraid—­I don’t quite understand.”

“Isn’t it clear, Mr. Holt?  I don’t like to appear spectacular, and I don’t want you to think of me as theatrical—­even now.  I hate that sort of thing.  You must simply believe me when I tell you it is impossible for me to reach Cordova alive.  If you do not help me to disappear, help me to live—­and at the same time give all others the impression that I am dead—­then I must do the other thing.  I must really die.”

For a moment his eyes blazed angrily.  He felt like taking her by the shoulders and shaking her, as he would have shaken the truth out of a child.

“You come to me with a silly threat like that, Miss Standish?  A threat of suicide?”

“If you want to call it that—­yes.”

“And you expect me to believe you?”

“I had hoped you would.”

She had his nerves going.  There was no doubt of that.  He half believed her and half disbelieved.  If she had cried, if she had made the smallest effort to work upon his sentiment, he would have disbelieved utterly.  But he was not blind to the fact that she was making a brave fight, even though a lie was behind it, and with a consciousness of pride that bewildered him.

She was not humiliating herself.  Even when she saw the struggle going on within him she made no effort to turn the balance in her favor.  She had stated the facts, as she claimed them to be.  Now she waited.  Her long lashes glistened a little.  But her eyes were clear, and her hair glowed softly, so softly that he would never forget it, as she stood there with her back against the door, nor the strange desire that came to him—­even then—­to touch it with his hand.

He nipped off the end of his cigar and lighted a match.  “It is Rossland,” he said.  “You’re afraid of Rossland?”

“In a way, yes; in a large way, no.  I would laugh at Rossland if it were not for the other.”

The other!  Why the deuce was she so provokingly ambiguous?  And she had no intention of explaining.  She simply waited for him to decide.

“What other?” he demanded.

“I can not tell you.  I don’t want you to hate me.  And you would hate me if I told you the truth.”

“Then you confess you are lying,” he suggested brutally.

Even this did not stir her as he had expected it might.  It did not anger her or shame her.  But she raised a pale hand and a little handkerchief to her eyes, and he turned toward the open port, puffing at his cigar, knowing she was fighting to keep the tears back.  And she succeeded.

“No, I am not lying.  What I have told you is true.  It is because I will not lie that I have not told you more.  And I thank you for the time you have given me, Mr. Holt.  That you have not driven me from your cabin is a kindness which I appreciate.  I have made a mistake, that is all.  I thought—­”