though she was, her years were still those of a girl— was poised gracefully on the lowermost slab.

There she hesitated perceptibly. His eyes met hers in a subtle underlook, and he saw that her face was deathly white. Yet there was neither fear nor indecision in her steadfast glance. Even while he asked dumbly why she waited, her lips parted, she held out her hands with a gesture of pleading, and she murmured:

"Oh, Derry, my own dear love, it is not the first but the last step which counts now!"

Then he took her in his arms, and their lips met—and for her there was no uncertainty ever more.

CHAPTER VIII

THE STEP THAT COUNTED

Of course, being a woman, she made believe that he had taken her by storm.

"Derry, dear, how could you?" she gasped, all rosy and breathless, and seemingly much occupied in smoothing her ruffled plumes during the first lull after the hurricane.

"You witch, who could resist you?" he muttered, showing well-marked symptoms of another attack.

"No, you'll just behave, and sit exactly where I shall point out!" she cried, and her pouting confidence gave eloquent testimony to the passing of an indelible phase in their relations. "And I am not a witch; but if you find it necessary to resist me, as you put it— Well, there! only this once. We must sit down and be serious. I have such a lot to say, and so little time in which to say it."

The new note struck by. the unfettered intimacy of her manner exercised an influence which Power would have regarded as a fantastic impossibility during those moments of delirium when first she clung to him, and both were shaken by irrepressible tumult. It said, far more plainly than impassioned speech, that she had thrown down all barriers, that she had counted the cost, and was giving herself freely and gladly to her mate. The recognition of this supreme surrender by a proud

woman, a woman to whom purity of thought was as the breath of life, administered a beneficial shock to his sorely tried nerves. Had a brilliant meteor flashed suddenly through space, and rushed headlong toward that part of the Atlantic which lapped the southern shore of Rhode Island, it could not have illuminated land and sea with more incisive clarity than did Nancy's attitude light up the dark places of his mind. Some stupendous thing had happened which would account for this miracle, and he must endeavor to understand. No matter what the effort needed, he must attend to her every word. In his inmost heart he knew that he cared not a jot what set of circumstances had brought about a development which he had not dared to dream of. He recked little of the cause now that its effect was graven on tablets more lasting than brass. But it was due to Nancy that he should be able to follow and appreciate her motives. He held fast to that thought in the midst of a vertigo. A waking nightmare had been changed in an instant into a beatitude akin, perilously akin, to that of the man and woman who found each other in the one perfect garden which this gray old world has seen, and no darkling vision of desert wastes and thorn-choked paths tortured the happy lovers now gazing fearlessly into each other's shining eyes. The heritage of "man's first disobedience" might oppress them all too soon; but, for that night at least, it lay hidden behind the veil. Exercising no slight command on his self-control, therefore, Power strove to revert to the well-ordered coherency of speech and action which he had schooled himself to adopt when in Nancy's presence.

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Forgive me if I have seemed rather mad," he pleaded, seating himself at her feet, and simulating a calmness which resembled the placid center of a cyclone. "During three long years I have hungered for the taste of your lips, Dear. That is my excuse, and it should serve; for I was content to wait as many decades if Fate kept firm in her resolve to deny you to me.”

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"You would never have yielded if I had not used a woman's guile?" she said, half questioning him, half stating a truism beyond reach of argument.

"There is little of guile in your nature, Nancy."

"Well, I think that is true, too; but it is equally true that a woman often takes what I may call a saner view of life than a man. She is quicker to admit the logic of accepted facts. If you discovered that some girl had won by false pretense, not your love, for love gilds the grossest clay, but your respect, as her husband, you would not spurn her with the loathing I feel now for the man who made me his wife. For that is what it has come to. I refuse to pose as Hugh Marten's wife in the eyes of the world one moment longer than is needful to obtain my freedom. His wife I have never been in the eyes of Heaven, because my Heaven is a place of love and content, and I have neither loved my husband nor been content with him, not for a single instant. Our marriage began with a lie, and has endured on a basis of lies. Such contracts, I believe, are void in law, and the principle which governs men in business should at least apply to that most solemn of all engagements, the lifelong union of husband and wife. Hugh Marten conspired with my father-hired him, I might rather say-to drive you and me apart,

Derry. The stronger and more subtle brain devised the means, and left it to the weaker one to carry out the scheme in sordid reality. As for me, I was helpless as a caged bird. How was I to guess that Marten, whom I knew only as the owner of the Bison mines and mills, had planned my capture? Even my poor, weak father did not suspect it till you were hundreds of miles away in California. And then how skilfully was the trap baited, and how swiftly it worked! You had not reached Sacramento before a lawyer wrote from Denver warning my father that the mortgagees were about to foreclose on the ranch. On several occasions previously he had been in arrears with the interest on the loan; but they had always proved considerate, and their just claims were met, sooner or later. Yet, in a year when scores of well-to-do ranchers were pressed for money, and when clemency became almost a right, these people proved implacable, and swooped down on him like a hawk on a crippled pigeon. Derry, you

bought the place who were they?'

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"I do not know. I dealt through a lawyer, and the vendor was Mr. Willard. He sold the property free of any encumbrance."

"Yet local opinion credited you and Mac with being a shrewd pair!" she commented, laughing softly, as if she were reviewing some tragi-comedy in a quizzical humor.

"We certainly wondered why Marten made things so easy for us-in other respects," he volunteered.

"Ah, then, you did have a glimmering suspicion of the truth? I guessed it; though I could not be absolutely certain till yesterday morning, when Mr. Benson