He stepped back, not quite understanding. She dropped off the horse, dragging her flowers with her, and faced him. She did not feel small or slender. She felt as high as a hill, although she had to look up at him so far. Her anger had its head against the sky. "Why do you talk about a man's love?" she asked him with a queer sort of patience. "I think--I hope--that you don't know anything about a man's love, oh, the _way_ men love!" She thought with swift pain of Jim, of Sylvester; "Oh, the _way_ they love!" And she found that, under her breath, she was sobbing, "Dickie! Dickie!" as though her heart had called. "Will you take back your horse, please?" she said, choking over these sobs which hurt her more at the moment than he had hurt her. "I'll never ride on him again. Don't come back here. Don't try to see me any more. I suppose it--it--the way you love me--is because I was a barmaid, because you heard people speak of me as 'Hudson's Queen.'" She conquered one of the sobs. "I thought that after you'd looked into my face so hard that night and stopped yourself from--from--my lips, that you had understood." She shook her head from side to side so violently, so childishly, that the short hair lashed across her eyes. "No one ever will understand!" She ran away from him and cried under her breath, "Dickie! Dickie!" She ran straight into the living-room and stopped in the middle of the floor. Her arms were full of the flowers she had pulled down from "Nigger Baby's" neck. "What did you want to bring in all that truck--?" Miss Blake began, rising from the pianola, then stopped. "What's the matter with you?" she asked. "Did your young man find you? I sent him up the trail." Her red eyes sparkled. "He insulted me!" gasped Sheila. "He dared to insult me!" She was dramatic with her helpless young rage. "He said I wasn't fit to--to be the mother of his children. And"--she laughed angrily, handling behind Cosme's back the weapon that she had been too merciful to use--"and _his_ mother is a murderess, found guilty of murder--and of worse!" A sort of ripple of sound behind made her turn. Cosme had followed her, was standing in the open door, and had heard her speech. The weapon had struck home, and she saw how it had poisoned all his blood. He vanished without a word. Sheila turned back to Miss Blake a paler face. She let fall all her flowers. "Now he'll never come back," she said. She climbed up the ladder to her loft.