“I’ll tell you the truth,” he answered, after studying her face for a moment in silence.  “I’d really be willing to get hurt over again for an excuse to live here like I have.  I am the loneliest man that was ever born—­lonely is no name for it.  In the dead hours of the night I suffer agonies—­you see, I am not a good sleeper.  I have been as near insanity as any man that ever lived out of an asylum.  But I have been mighty nearly free from all that since you began to nurse me.  I wish to God it could go on forever—­forever, do you understand?—­but it can’t—­it can’t.  I have my troubles and you have yours—­that is,” he added, quickly, as she shot a sudden glance of inquiry at him, “I reckon you have troubles, most girls do.”

“Yes, I have my troubles, Mr. Westerfelt,” she said, simply.  “Sometimes I think I cannot bear mine, but I do.”

He said nothing, but his eyes were upon her almost with a look of fear.  Was she about to tell him frankly of her love for Wambush?

She rolled up one of the blankets and put it on the rug in front of the fire, and held up another to be warmed.  He thought he had never seen a face so full of sweet, suffering tenderness.  His heart bounded suddenly with a thought so full of joy that he could hardly breathe.  She had driven the outlaw from her heart and already loved him; she had learned to love him since he had been there.  He could see it, feel it in her every tender word and act, and he—­God knew he loved her—­loved her with his whole wearied soul.  Then the thought of her appeal to old John Wambush and the lies she had told that night to save her lover struck him like a blow in the face, and he felt himself turning cold all over in the embrace of utter despair.  “No, no, no!” he said, in his heart, “she’s not for me!  I could never forget that—­never!  I’ve always felt that the woman I loved must never have loved before, and Wambush—­ugh!”

She raised her great eyes to his in the mellow firelight, and then, as if puzzled by his expression, calmly studied his face.

“You are not going back to that room over the stable, are you?” she questioned.

“Yes, to-morrow night.”

“Don’t do it—­it is not comfortable; it is awfully roomy and bare and cold.”

“Oh, I am used to that.  Many a time I’ve slept out in the open air on a frosty night, with nothing round me but a blanket.”

“You could occupy this room whenever it suited you; it is seldom used.  I heard mother say yesterday that she wished you would.”

“I’d better stay there,” he answered, moved again by her irresistible solicitude, and that other thing in her tone to which he had laid claim and hugged to his bruised heart.  He felt an almost uncontrollable desire to raise her in his arms, to unbosom his anguish to her, and propose that they both fight their battles of forgetfulness side by side, but he shrank from it.  The thought of Wambush was again upon him like some rasping soul-irritant.