“I intended,” she began in a low, strange voice, “to go to you, to tell you——­”

“Answer me,” he said sternly.  “Yes or no.  Did you marry me without love and just to save yourself from possible gossip of being alone all night with a man?  Is that why you married me?  Yes or no?”

To Gloria, as to King, the issue was clear and not to be clouded; to her credit be it said that she wasted no time in fruitless evasion.  This matter would demand settlement, as well now as later.  There was wisdom in ending all unpleasantness once and for ever.

“Yes,” she answered defiantly.

Then suddenly it was given her to see a Mark King she had never dreamed of, a Mark King of blazing wrath thrusting aside the man whom she knew and who had held himself in check and throttled down his emotion until she spoke that quiet “Yes.”  The word was like a spark to a train of gunpowder.  His determination to beat down his temper, no matter what came, was gone; his memory of her ordeals was wiped out; from his whole tense being there flashed out upon her a hot, heady anger, like stabbing lightning from an ominous cloud.  His few words seared and scorched a place in her memory to endure always.

He clenched his hands and raised them; for an instant she thought he was going to strike her down.

“You are utterly contemptible!” he shouted at her.  “And I am done with you!”

He turned and left her.  Gloria stared after him in amazement.  She saw how he walked swiftly, his big boots crunching through the gravel down by the creek bed, splashing through the water, carrying him up the timbered slope toward the horses.  She could not know that he was almost running because he was telling himself in his fierce white passion that unless he left her thus he would lose the last power of restraint, and set his hands to her pink-and-white throat and choke her.  Until the last second he had sought not to condemn too soon.  Now, after his fashion, he condemned sweepingly.  For the moment he held that she was less to him than the grime upon his boots.

When he came to the horses he was white with anger; he lifted his hand and looked at his fingers queerly; they were trembling.  He cursed himself for a fool, shut the hand into a hard fist as steady as rock, and for an instant glared at it blackly.  Then he opened the fingers slowly; a hard smile made his mouth ugly and left it cruel; the fingers had hearkened to a superb will, and gave no greater hint of trembling than did the nigged hole of the giant cedar under which he stood.

He coiled his horse’s tie-rope and led him back to camp.  As he drew near, Gloria promptly turned her back and studied her nails; she had had encounters with men before now and had not yet gauged the profundity of this man’s emotion.  She counted fully on bringing him to a full and contrite sense of his crime before she condescended so much as to look at him.  But when she flashed him a quick, furtive