“No, no!  Great Scott!  But see here,”—­Foster laid his hand on her arm and drew her on down the path, “don’t try to tell me any more.  I understand.  Banks shouldn’t have told you.  Come, remember Tisdale won through.  He’s safe.”

After a silence, she said:  “I doubt if you know how ill he has been.”

“Tisdale?  No, I hadn’t heard.”

“I only learned to-day; and he has been in a Washington hospital all these months.  The surgeons advised amputating his hand,” she went on with a tremulous breathlessness, “but he refused.  He said he would take the risk; that right hand was more than half of him, his ‘better half.’”

Involuntarily Foster smiled in recognition of that dominant note in Tisdale.  “But he never seemed more physically fit than on the night I left Seattle,” he expostulated.  “And there isn’t a man in Alaska who understands the dangers and the precautions of frostbite better than Hollis Tisdale does.”

“It was not frost; it was a vicious horse,” she answered.  “It happened after you saw him, on that trip to Wenatchee, while he was leading the vixen over a break in the road.  We were obliged to spend the night at a wretched way-house, and the hurt became infected.”

Foster stopped.  “You were obliged to spend the night?” he inquired.

“Yes.  It happened in this way.  Mr. Tisdale had taken the Milwaukee line over the mountains, intending to finish the trip on horseback, to see the country, and I, you remember, was motoring through Snoqualmie Pass with the Morgansteins.  His train barely missed colliding with our car.  Mr. Morganstein was injured, and the others took the westbound home with him, but I decided to board the eastbound and go on by stage to Wenatchee, to see my desert tract, and return by way of the Great Northern.  I found the stage service discontinued, so Mr. Tisdale secured a team instead of a saddle-horse, and we drove across.”

“I see.”  Foster smiled again.  So Tisdale had capitulated on sight.  “I see.  You looked the tract over together, yet he hesitated with his offer.”

She did not answer directly.  They had reached the pergola, and she put out her hand groping, steadying herself through the shadows.  “Mr. Tisdale believed at the beginning I was some one else,” she said then.  “I was so entirely different from his conception of David Weatherbee’s wife.  In the end he offered to finance the project if I would see it carried through.  I refused.”

“Of course you refused,” responded Foster quickly.  “It was preposterous of him to ask it of you.  I can’t understand it in Tisdale.  He was always so broad, so fine, so head and shoulders above other men, so, well, chivalrous to women.  But, meantime, while he hesitated, Banks came with his offer?”