She struck the bell savagely as he sprang to his feet with a choking cry. "And, now that you know, I confidently invoke your honor, your clean manliness, for my protection. You will help me against myself, will you not, dear?" "And who will help me?" he muttered hoarsely. The perspiration was standing in white beads on his forehead. Swift as a flash she crossed over to him and laid her hand trustfully on his arm. "We will help each other, beloved. Good night." But hours after he had succumbed to the seductions of his coarse blankets she lay on her dainty bed with clenched hands and sleepless eyes, trying to pierce the gloomy veil of futurity and tearfully striving to reconcile a great misery with a greater joy. "I love him! I love him!" she moaned passionately, "and if it were not for that milk-and-water baby he would love me with all the savage strength and intensity of his fierce nature. Oh! my Wolf, my strong, wild Wolf! What can that vapid ninny offer you in comparison to what I would give?" She sat up erect, her eyes blazing in the darkness like those of a hunted wild beast. "She shall not--I swear it! Home, station, wealth, honor, body and soul--I will sacrifice all! He is mine! mine! mine!" After awhile, in sheer exhaustion of passion, she fell into a troubled sleep. The next day he obtained leave of absence for a fortnight's inspection of his mines. En route he mailed several letters entrusted by Mrs. Brevoort, one of which was addressed to a woman in New York. She was one of those inveterate gossips of high station who act as purveyors of "exclusive information" to the society editors of the great fashionable journals. Some days later he stopped at Tin Cup for the ranch mail; it included a rather short and unsatisfactory note from Grace, written hurriedly in transit, announcing her party's embarkation on Lord Ellerslie's yacht for a cruise on the Mediterranean. The girl was really homesick in truth, but relying too implicitly on Love's divination had omitted to make that fact clear, ending her missive with the ambiguous sentence: "I wish we had never left home. I am so unhappy." It was the first communication he had received from her for over six weeks. He did not know that her customary budget, a sort of daily diary mailed once a month, had gone down with the fated _Peruvia_ in mid-ocean, and he was uneasy and resentful. Mrs. Brevoort was out riding when he reached the ranch, so he merely instructed 'Rastus to inform her of his return, and dined at the common mess house. In the interim of waiting he glanced casually over the contents of the New York papers which he had received in the mail. Unto Constance Brevoort, awaiting him with a great trepidation in the little den, came a white-lipped, stern-faced man with a paper crushed In his hand.