"I'd rather be a spiteful little cat, which is what she once called me, than to be moth-eaten on the inside, like that!" she commented. Then she went on: "With Miss Farnham out of it--and I knew she must be out of it, since Broffin didn't strike--there was still Mr. Galbraith. You didn't know why I was so anxious to have you get acquainted with him, but you know now. And it worked. When Broffin asked him to identify you, he couldn't--or wouldn't. Then came that unlucky drowning accident." Griswold nodded slowly. "Yes, Mr. Galbraith knows me now." "He doesn't!" she exulted. "He is a dear old saint, and he will never know you again as the man who held him up. Listen: he sent for Broffin this afternoon, and gave him a new commission--something about bonds in California. And he told him he must go on the first train!" Once more the castaway was running the gamut of the fiercely varying emotions. "Let me understand," he said. "You knew I had taken the money, and yet you did all these things to pull me out and make the hold-up a success. Where was your moral sense, all this time, little girl?" She made a charming little mouth at him. "I am _Joan_, and the _Joans_ don't have any moral senses--to speak of--do they? That's the way you are writing it down in your book, isn't it?" Then, with a low laugh that sounded some unfathomed depth of loving abandonment: "It was a game; and I played it--played it for all I was worth, and won. You are free; free as the air, Kenneth, boy. If Broffin should come here this minute and put his hand on your shoulder, you could look up and laugh in his face. Are you glad--or sorry?" His answer was the answer of the man who was, for the time being, neither the moralist nor the criminal. With a swift out-reaching he drew her to him, crushed her in his arms, covered her face with kisses. "I am glad--glad that I am your lover," he whispered, passionately. "God, girl! but you are a woman to die for! No, not yet"--when she would have slipped out of his arms--"Believe me, Margery; there has never been any one else--not for a moment. But I thought it was Raymer, and for your sake and his I could have stepped aside; I did try to step aside. That is the one decent thing I have done in all this devilish business. Are you listening?" She had stopped struggling, and was hiding her face on his shoulder. He felt her quick little nod and went on. "Since you know the one decent thing, you must know all the horrible things, too. A dozen times I have been a murderer in heart, and once ... you know: I meant to let Galbraith die, that night." She looked up quickly.