"There was a time, once, when you really thought you were in love with me, wasn't there, Bertie?" she asked sweetly. Again I told her the simple truth. "There was a time; yes. It was when I was still young enough to carry your books back and forth on the way to and from the old school." "But you got bravely over it, after awhile?" "Yes; I got over it after I grew up." She laughed softly. "Don't you know that is a frightfully dangerous thing to say to a woman--to any woman, Bertie?" "It is the honest thing to say to you." "I suppose it is. Yet there are some things a woman likes better than honesty. Perhaps you haven't been making love to the Cripple Creek girl long enough to find that out. But it is so, and it always will be so." It was at the outer door opening that she gave me the final stab. "I am taking your business excuse at its face value to-night and letting you go. But the next time you come you mustn't have any business; at least, nothing more important than entertaining me--and that is important. Just jot that down in your little vest-pocket memorandum, and don't allow yourself to forget it for a single moment; not even while you are making love to Little Brown-Eyes. Good-night." The old-fashioned preachers used to describe a terrifying hell in which fire and brimstone and all manner of physical torments awaited the impenitent. I was brought up to believe implicitly in such a hell, but the puerility of it as compared with the refined tortures which I endured that winter can never be set forth in any words of mine. With a desire keener than the hunger of the famishing for respectability and the privilege of living open-eyed and honestly before all men, I was forced, from the night of that first visit to Agatha Geddis, to lead a wretched, fear-frozen, double existence. On my return to Cripple Creek after the interview which I have just detailed, I swore roundly that I would stop going to the Everton's; that, come what might, Polly should never be dragged into the horrible morass of degradation which I saw clearly, even at that bare beginning, was waiting to engulf me. But at best, a man is only a man, human in his desires, human in his powers of resistance; and a man in love can rarely be a complete master of circumstances. Though I had been holding back, both for Barrett's sake and because of my own wretched handicap, it soon became apparent that I had gone too far to be able to retreat with honor; that Polly Everton's name had already been coupled with mine in the gossip of the great gold camp; and that--if what Barrett had said were true--Polly herself had to be considered.