With Ford’s desire to break the force which made him an impostor she had sympathy, but his willingness to risk his life in order to be in harmony with law and order again was not so easy for her to understand.  While education, training and taste kept her, in her own person, within the restrictions of civilized life, yet the part of a free-lance in the world appealed to her strongly atavistic instincts far more directly than membership in a disciplined regular army.  The guerilla fighter must of necessity be put to shifts—­even moral shifts—­which the common soldier, trained and commanded by others, can be spared; but her heart was with the man roving in the hills on his own account.  That Ford should deliberately seek chains in barracks, when by her surrender on the subject of Evie she had made it possible for him still to keep the liberty of the field, was to her at once incomprehensible and awful.  She had not only the sense of watching a man rushing upon Fate, but the knowledge that she herself had given him the impetus; while she was fully alive to the fact that when he fell everything she cared for in the world would fall with him.

Her mind was too resourceful, her spirit too energetic, to permit of her sitting in helpless anguish over his new determination.  She was already busy with plans for counteracting him, in one of which at least she saw elements of hope.  Having conceived its possibilities, she was eager to go and test them; but she had decided not to leave the house until she knew that Ford was really putting his plans into execution.  The minute Evie learned the fatal news she would have need of her, and she dared not put herself out of the child’s reach.  Her first duty must be toward the fragile little creature, who would be crushed like a trampled flower.

Shortly before noon she was summoned to the telephone, where Evie was asking if she should find her in.  Miriam judged from the tones of the transmitted voice that the worst had been made known.  She was not, however, prepared for the briskness with which, ten minutes later, Evie whisked into the room, her cheeks aglow with excitement and her heavenly eyes dancing with a purely earthly sparkle.

“Isn’t this awful?” she cried, before Miriam could take her into her loving arms.  “Isn’t it appalling?  But it’s not a surprise to me—­not in the least.  I knew there was something.  Haven’t I said so?  I almost knew that his name wasn’t Strange.  If I hadn’t been so busy with my coming out—­and everything—­I should have been sure of it.  I haven’t had time to think of it—­do you see?  With a lunch somewhere every day at half-past one,” she hurried on, breathlessly, “and a tea at half-past four, and a dinner at eight, and a dance at eleven, and very likely the theatre or the opera in between—­well, you can see I haven’t been able to give much attention to anything else; but I knew, from the very time when I was in Buenos Aires, that there was something queer about that name.  I never saw a man so sensitive when any one spoke about his name, not in all my life before—­and you know down there it’s the commonest thing—­why, they’re so suspicious on that point that they’d almost doubt that mine was Evie Colfax.”