She came back two steps, her face tear-wet, her features quivering with grief. "But there's something else between us, Harlan, blacker and deeper than all the rest. Don't try to cross it to come to me. You will sink in it. Fools for wives have spoiled too many men in this world. I understand now! Your grandfather knew." She raised her eyes, and crossed herself reverently. "Mother Mary, help me in this, my temptation!" She turned, and ran away, sobbing. Harlan hurried a few steps after her, crying appeals. But he did not persist. Her passionate protests had come from her heart, he knew. He did not dare to force himself on her when she was in that mood. He sat down again on the church steps. He remained there in deep thought until the red eyes in Dennis Kavanagh's house blinked out. He did not find it easy to understand himself, exactly. His feelings had been played upon too powerfully to permit calm consideration. He felt confident in his affection for her. But her youth and the obstacles he understood so well put marriage so out of immediate consideration that he merely grieved rather than made definite plans for their future. With moist eyes he looked up at the dark house on the hill and pledged loyalty to the child-woman, knowing that he loved her. But that the love was the love that mates man and woman for the struggles, the prizes, the woes, and the contentment of life he was not sure--for he still looked on Clare Kavanagh as more child than woman. Marriage seemed yet a long way ahead of him. He rode slowly back to "The Barracks." His problem seemed to be riding double with him. The problem, one might say, was in the form of a maid on a pillion. But he did not look behind to see whether the maid bore the features of Clare Kavanagh or Madeleine Presson. At that moment he was sure that only Clare's image rode with him. But in thinking of her he understood his limitations. For, woodsman and unversed in the ways of women, he had not arrived at that point in life where he could analyze even a boy's love, much less a man's passion. The next morning he left Fort Canibas with big Ben Kyle, to make a tour of the Thornton camps. It was a trip that took in the cruising of a township for standing timber on short rations and in the height of the blackfly season, an experience not conducive to reflections on love and matrimony. But when he returned to Fort Canibas, on the eve of his departure to take up his duties as General Waymouth's chief of staff, he saddled his horse and rode across the long bridge.