He was beginning to feel a dull and painless sort of calm, the stoicism which came to possess him whenever he was confronted by the inevitable.  He sat down, and with his head bowed over it took one of the limp, little hands that lay in Mary Standish’s lap.  The warmth had gone out of it.  It was cold and lifeless.  He caressed it gently and held it between his brown, muscular hands, staring at it, and yet seeing nothing in particular.  It was only the ticking of Keok’s clock that broke the silence for a time.  Then he released the hand, and it dropped in the girl’s lap again.  She had been looking steadily at the streak of gray in his hair.  And a light came into her eyes, a light which he did not see, and a little tremble of her lips, and an almost imperceptible inclination of her head toward him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t know,” he said.  “I realize now how you must have felt back there in the cottonwoods.”

“No, you don’t realize—­you don’t!” she protested.

In an instant, it seemed to him, a vibrant, flaming life swept over her again.  It was as if his words had touched fire to some secret thing, as if he had unlocked a door which grim hopelessness had closed.  He was amazed at the swiftness with which color came into her cheeks.

“You don’t understand, and I am determined that you shall,” she went on.  “I would die before I let you go away thinking what is now in your mind.  You will despise me, but I would rather be hated for the truth than because of the horrible thing which you must believe if I remain silent.”  She forced a wan smile to her lips.  “You know, Belinda Mulrooneys were very well in their day, but they don’t fit in now, do they?  If a woman makes a mistake and tries to remedy it in a fighting sort of way, as Belinda Mulrooney might have done back in the days when Alaska was young—­”

She finished with a little gesture of despair.

“I have committed a great folly,” she said, hesitating an instant in his silence.  “I see very clearly now the course I should have taken.  You will advise me that it is still not too late when you have heard what I am going to say.  Your face is like—­a rock.”

“It is because your tragedy is mine,” he said.

She turned her eyes from him.  The color in her cheeks deepened.  It was a vivid, feverish glow.  “I was born rich, enormously, hatefully rich,” she said in the low, unimpassioned voice of a confessional.  “I don’t remember father or mother.  I lived always with my Grandfather Standish and my Uncle Peter Standish.  Until I was thirteen I had my Uncle Peter, who was grandfather’s brother, and lived with us.  I worshiped Uncle Peter.  He was a cripple.  From young manhood he had lived in a wheel-chair, and he was nearly seventy-five when he died.  As a baby that wheel-chair, and my rides in it with him about the great house in which we lived, were my delights.  He was my father and mother, everything that was good and sweet in life.  I