The colonel waved them away with that, and turned again, with his jerky suddenness, to his telegrams and letters. The colonel had not meant for Macdonald to pass out of the door through which he had entered. That was the military portal; the other one, opening into the hall from which Frances came, was the world's door for entering that house. And it was in that direction Colonel Landcraft had waved them when he ordered Frances to take the visitor away. "This way, Mr. Macdonald, please," said she, politely cold, unfeelingly formal. For all the warmth that he could discover in her voice and eyes, or in her white face, so unaccountably severe and hard, there might never have been a garden with white gravel path, or a hot hasty kiss given in it--and received. In the hall the gloom of evening was deepened into darkness that made her face indistinct, like the glimmering whiteness of the hydrangea blooms in that past romantic night. She marched straight to the street door and opened it, and he had no strength in his words to lift even a small one up to stay her. He believed that he had taken the man's course and the way of honor in the matter. That it had not been indorsed by her was evident, he believed. "There was nothing for me to conceal," said he, as the door opened upon the gray twilight and glooming trees along the street; "I came in a man's way, as I thought--" "You came in a man's way, Mr. Macdonald, to ask the privilege of attempting to win a woman's hand, when you lack the man's strength or the man's courage to defend even the glove that covers it," she said. Her voice was low; it was accusingly scornful. Macdonald started. "Then it has come back to you?" "It has come back to me, through a channel that I would have given the hand that wore it"--she stretched it out as she spoke; it glimmered like a nebulous star in misty skies there in the gloom before his eyes--"to have kept the knowledge from!" "I lost it," said he, drawing himself up as if to withstand a blow, "and in this hour I can plead no mitigation. A man should have put his life down for it." "It might have been expected--of a man," said she. "But I ask you not to borrow trouble over the circumstance of its return to you, Miss Landcraft," he said, cold now in his word, and lofty. "You dropped it on the ballroom floor or in the garden path, and I, the cattle thief, found it and carried it away, to show it as evidence of a shadowy conquest, maybe, among my wild and lawless kind. Beyond that you know nothing--you lost it, that was all." In the door he turned. "Good-bye, Mr. Macdonald," she said. "If time and events prove so unkind to me that I never come to a vindication in this country," he said, "just go on thinking of me as a thief and a wild rider, and a man of the night. Good-bye, Miss Landcraft."