Next day Bayard was back and found that the hours Ann had spent alone had taken their toll and she controlled herself only by continual repression. He urged her to talk, hoping to start her thinking fresh thoughts, but she could think, then, only of the present hour. Her loneliness had again broken down all barriers. Bayard was her confessor, her talk with him the only outlet for the emotional pressure that threatened her self-control; that relief was imperative, overriding her distrust of the day before. For an hour the man listened while she gave him the dreary details of her married life with that eagerness of the individual who, for too long a period, has hidden and nursed heart-breaking troubles. She was only twenty-four and had married at twenty. A year later Ned's father had died, the boy came into sudden command of considerable property, lost his head, frittered away the fortune, drank, could not face the condemnation of his family and fled West on the pretext of developing the Sunset mine, the last tangible asset that remained. She tried to cover the entire truth there, but Bayard knew that Lytton's move was only desertion, for she told of going to work to support herself, of standing between Ned and his relatives, of shielding him from the consequences of the misadministration of his father's estate, of waiting weeks and months for word of him, of denying herself actual necessities that she might come West on this mission. At the end she cried and Bayard felt an unholy desire to ride to his Circle A ranch and do violence to the man who had functioned in this woman's life as a maker of misery. But he merely sat there and put his hands under his thighs to keep them from reaching out for the woman, to comfort her, to claim a place as her protector.... The talk and tears relieved Ann and she smiled bravely at him when he left; a tenderness was in her face that disturbed him. Day after day the rancher appeared in Yavapai, each time going directly to the hotel and to Ann. Many times he talked to her in her room; often, they were seen together on the veranda; occasionally, they walked short distances. The eyes of the community were on Ann anyhow, because, being new, she was intrinsically interesting, but this regularity on the part of Bayard could not help but attract curious attention and cause gossip, for in the years people had watched him grow from a child to manhood one of the accepted facts about him had been his evident lack of interest in women. To Nora, the waitress, he had given frank, companionable attention and regarding them was a whispered tradition arising when the unknown girl arrived in Yavapai and Bruce appeared to be on intimate terms with her from the first.