Kells was always up till late in the night and slept half of the next morning.  It was his wont to see Joan every day about noon.  He had a care for his appearance.  When he came in he was dark, forbidding, weary, and cold.  Manifestly he came to her to get rid of the imponderable burden of the present.  He left it behind him.  He never spoke a word of Alder Creek, of gold, of the Border Legion.  Always he began by inquiring for her welfare, by asking what he could do for her, what he could bring her.  Joan had an abhorrence of Keils in his absence that she never felt when he was with her; and the reason must have been that she thought of him, remembered him as the bandit, and saw him as another and growing character.  Always mindful of her influence, she was as companionable, as sympathetic, as cheerful, and sweet as it was possible for her to be.  Slowly he would warm and change under her charm, and the grim gloom, the dark strain, would pass from him.  When that left he was indeed another person.  Frankly he told Joan that the glimpse of real love she had simulated back there in Cabin Gulch was seldom out of his mind.  No woman had ever kissed him like she had.  That kiss had transfigured him.  It haunted him.  If he could not win kisses like that from Joan’s lips, of her own free will, then he wanted none.  No other woman’s lips would ever touch his.  And he begged Joan in the terrible earnestness of a stern and hungering outcast for her love.  And Joan could only sadly shake her head and tell him she was sorry for him, that the more she really believed he loved her the surer she was that he would give her up.  Then always he passionately refused.  He must have her to keep, to look at as his treasure, to dream over, and hope against hope that she would love him some day.  Women sometimes learned to love their captors, he said; and if she only learned, then he would take her away to Australia, to distant lands.  But most of all he begged her to show him again what it meant to be loved by a good woman.  And Joan, who knew that her power now lay in her unattainableness, feigned a wavering reluctance, when in truth any surrender was impossible.  He left her with a spirit that her presence gave him, in a kind of trance, radiant, yet with mocking smile, as if he foresaw the overthrow of his soul through her, and in the light of that his waning power over his Legion was as nothing.

In the afternoon he went down into camp to strengthen the associations he had made, to buy claims, and to gamble.  Upon his return Joan, peeping through a crack between the boards, could always tell whether he had been gambling, whether he had won or lost.