“You don’t know I love you, do you?” he continued, passionately. “That ever since you stood before me in that hole at Chiricahua I’ve loved you? You can’t see I’ve been another man, loving you, working for you, living for you? You won’t believe I’ve turned my back on the old wild life, that I’ve been decent and honorable and happy and useful—your kind of a cowboy? You couldn’t tell, though I loved you, that I never wanted you to know it, that I never dared to think of you except as my angel, my holy Virgin? What do you know of a man’s heart and soul? How could you tell of the love, the salvation of a man who’s lived his life in the silence and loneliness? Who could teach you the actual truth—that a wild cowboy, faithless to mother and sister, except in memory, riding a hard, drunken trail straight to hell; had looked into the face, the eyes of a beautiful woman infinitely beyond him, above him, and had so loved her that he was saved—that he became faithful again—that he saw her face in every flower and her eyes in the blue heaven? Who could tell you, when at night I stood alone under these Western stars, how deep in my soul I was glad just to be alive, to be able to do something for you, to be near you, to stand between you and worry, trouble, danger, to feel somehow that I was a part, just a little part of the West you had come to love?” Madeline was mute. She heard her heart thundering in her ears. Stewart leaped at her. His powerful hand closed on her arm. She trembled. His action presaged the old instinctive violence. “No; but you think I kept Bonita up in the mountains, that I went secretly to meet her, that all the while I served you I was—Oh, I know what you think! I know now. I never knew till I made you look at me. Now, say it! Speak!” White-hot, blinded, utterly in the fiery grasp of passion, powerless to stem the rush of a word both shameful and revealing and fatal, Madeline cried: “YES!” He had wrenched that word from her, but he was not subtle enough, not versed in the mystery of woman’s motive enough, to divine the deep significance of her reply. For him the word had only literal meaning confirming the dishonor in which she held him. Dropping her arm, he shrank back, a strange action for the savage and crude man she judged him to be. “But that day at Chiricahua you spoke of faith,” he burst out. “You said the greatest thing in the world was faith in human nature. You said the finest men had been those who had fallen low and had risen. You said you had faith in me! You made me have faith in myself!” His reproach, without bitterness or scorn, was a lash to her old egoistic belief in her fairness. She had preached a beautiful principle that she had failed to live up to. She understood his rebuke, she wondered and wavered, but the affront to her pride had been too great, the tumult within her breast had been too startlingly fierce; she could not speak, the moment passed, and with it his brief, rugged splendor of simplicity.