“Tell me,” said King heavily, “when you refused to marry Gratton last night—­did you know that I was outside?”

“Yes,” she answered.  She wondered why he asked.  “There was a mirror; I saw your reflection in it.”

“If I had not come—­would you have gone on with the thing?” He hesitated, then said harshly:  “Would you have married him?”

“I don’t know.  Oh,” she exclaimed, twisting at her hands, “how can I tell what I would have done? driven one way, torn another——­”

“You might have married him?  You but chose me as the lesser of two evils?  Was that it?”

“I tell you I don’t know!  I only know that I was hideously compromised; I would never have dared show my face again in San Francisco—­anywhere—­it would have killed me——­”

And even yet there was in King’s face only a queer tortured incredulity.  For a long time neither moved nor spoke.  His eyes were on her, hers intently on him.  When he answered it was in a voice from which all of to-day’s joyousness had fled.

“I’m going to make your bed, Gloria,” he said evenly.  “Near the fire, which I’ll keep going.  I’ll make mine on the outside, so you need not be afraid of any prowling animal.  Then in the morning we will talk.”

She watched him go back for his scattered fir-boughs.  And even Gloria noted how heavy was his walk.  But she could not guess how when he was alone with his trees, and the darkness dropped curtainwise between him and her he went down on both knees and buried his face in one of those same fallen sprays from the fir.

Chapter XVIII

Flat on his back lay Mark King, his hands under his head, his eyes upon the slow procession of the stars.  Just so had he lain many a night in the forest-land—­but life then and now were as two distinct existences which had nothing in common, but were set apart in two separate worlds, remote one from the other.  Now he saw the stars, as it were, with the physical eye alone, merely because they blazed so bright against the darkness above him; he was scarcely conscious of their gleam and sparkle.  Of old he had been wont to commune with them; through the long years they had woven themselves into his rough-and-ready religion.  Countless times had he watched them and mused and hearkened to the message which, as with a still voice, infinitely calming, travelled to him across the limitless vastitude of the universe.  Countless times that voice had called him away from the toils and victories and defeats of the day, up into a place of quiet from which a man might look about him with a somewhat truer perspective; he glimpsed futility in much of human strife and striving; he saw nobility enshrined in a “small” act; he marked how, set in the scales of the eternal balances of scope and eternity, a copper penny set against a million dollars were as two feathers; they rode light, and there was little choice between them.  He had known that firefly cluster of lights above