"You have nothing whatever to take back," she said, smiling up at him from her seat on the running-board of the roadster. "She is all you said she was--and more. She is gorgeously beautiful!" Smith flung his freshly lighted cigar away and climbed out to sit beside her. "What do you think of me?" he demanded bluntly. "What should I think? Didn't I scold you for running away from her that first evening? I am glad you thought better of it afterward." "I am not thinking better of it at all--in the way you mean." "But Miss Richlander is," was the quiet reply. "You have a right to say anything you please; and after it is all said, to say it again. I am not the man you have been taking me for; not in any respect. Your father knows now, and he will tell you." "Colonel-daddy has told me one thing--the thing you told him to tell me. And I am sorry--sorry and disappointed." He smiled morosely. "Billy Starbuck calls the Timanyoni a half-reformed gun-country, and from the very first he has been urging me to 'go heeled,' as he phrases it." "It isn't the mere carrying of a gun," she protested. "With most men that would be only a prudent precaution for the leader in a fight like this one you are making. But it means more than that to you; it means a complete change of attitude toward your kind. Tell me if I am wrong." "No; you are right. The time is coming when I shall be obliged to kill somebody. And I think I shall rather welcome it." "Now you have gone so far away that I can hardly see you," she said softly. "'Once in a blue moon,' you said, the impossible might happen. It _did_ happen in your case, didn't it?--giving you a chance to grow and expand and to break with all the old traditions, whatever they were. And the break left you free to make of yourself what you should choose. You have all the abilities; you can reach out and take what other men have to beg for. Once you thought you would take only the best, and then you grew so fast that we could hardly keep you in sight. But now you are meaning to take the worst." "I don't understand," he said soberly. "You will understand some day," she asserted, matching his sober tone. "When that time comes, you will know that the only great men are those who love their fellow men; who are too big to be little; who can fight without hatred; who can die, if need be, that others may live." "My God!" said the man, and though he said it under his breath there was, pent up in the two words, the cry of a soul in travail; a soul to whom its own powers have suddenly been revealed, together with its lost opportunities and its crushing inability to rise to the heights supernal. "It came too soon--if I could only have had a little more time," he was saying; but at that, the colonel and Williams came up, bringing Miss Richlander, and the heart-mellowing moment was gone.