At the sound of it Rhoda’s little, half-conscious coquetries dropped from her instantly. It was a serious face that his gaze encountered as he surveyed her with dark eyes glowing and about his mouth the baffled but determined look that had become for her a sign of his strength--measure alike of his self-control and of his determination. She had seen it in every one of their struggles and it had seemed always to be saying to her, “You’ve conquered this time, but I shall win you yet!” She watched for it and loved it because it told her alike of her power over him and of his forceful masculine will, and perhaps also because deep down in her heart she half believed and almost hoped it would yet be stronger than her own resolution. “Why do you insist upon keeping us apart?” he demanded, an imperious note in his voice. “You are doing a wicked thing. You’ve no right to starve both our hearts of the love that belongs to us, because of a mere whim!” “Listen to me, Jeff, while I tell you the truth, and then you won’t want to marry me!” She was sitting straight and stiff, her face pale, and in it something of the same exaltation he had seen there on that June day in the arbor--the outward glow of the sacrificial fires she had lighted for the consuming of her love. “You don’t know what I am, Jeff! I am a nigger-thief and I am proud of it! I am stealing your slaves, anybody’s slaves that want their freedom, and helping them to find their way to Canada, where they will be safe! Jefferson Delavan, of Fairmount, Kentucky, doesn’t want to marry a woman who does that sort of thing and means to keep it up as long as there are slaves and she has power to help them!” He looked at her a moment in silent amazement. “Rhoda, you don’t realize the full significance of what you are saying, and doing!” “If I could I would run off every slave from your plantations and send them all to Canada, where you could never touch one of them again. That is how much I realize it!” A slow smile crept over his face while he regarded her with a look that was half surprise, half overleaping love, and was not without a touch of tender amusement. “But if you were to take away all my slaves, dear heart, you wouldn’t do me nearly the harm that you are doing now by stealing yourself from me!” Her serious eyes looked straight into his for a moment in silence, and then her flashing smile broke over her face. “I won’t ask you to put your words to the proof,” she said in a quizzical tone.