Neither of them welcomed the chance that had thrown them together again. It shocked the pride of the woman, put her under an obligation to the man against whom she had nursed resentment for years. His presence stressed the degradation into which she seemed to herself to have fallen. For him, too, the meeting was untimely. To-day of all days he wanted to forget the past, to turn over a page that was to begin the story of a new record. Deliberately he had shut the door on the story of his unhappy love for Norma Davis, and with an impish grin fate had flung it open again. The heady wilfulness of the girl had given place to the tight-lipped self-repression of a suffering woman. Not once in all the years had she complained to an outsider. But her flight was a confession. The stress of her feeling overflowed into words bitter and stinging. “You’ve got your revenge, Rowan McCoy. If I treated you shabbily you can say ‘I told you so’ now. They used to say I was too proud. Maybe I was. Well, I’ve been paid for it a thousand times. I’ve got mighty little to be proud of to-day.” “Norma!” he pleaded in a low voice. With the instinct of one who bites on an ulcerated tooth to accent the pain, she drew up a loose sleeve and showed him blue-and-yellow bruises. “Look!” she ordered in an ecstasy of self-contempt. “I’ve hidden this sort of thing for years—and worse—a hundred times worse.” “The hound!” His strong, clenched teeth smothered the word. Instantly the mood of the woman changed. She would have none of his sympathy. “I’m a fool,” she snapped. “I’ve made my bed. I’ll lie in it. This world wasn’t built for women, anyhow. Why should I complain?” Never a talkative man, McCoy said nothing now. They had reached the Fryingpan, and the road wound down beside the little river as it tumbled toward the plains over bowlders and around them. The trout were feeding, and occasionally one leaped for a fly, a flash of silver in the sunlight. Both of them recalled vividly the time they had last gone fishing here. They had taken a picnic lunch, and it had been on the way home that a quarrel had flashed between them about the attentions of Joe Tait to her. That night she had eloped. The woman noticed that McCoy was not wearing to-day the broad-rimmed white felt hat and the wrinkled corduroys that were so much an expression of his personality. He was in a new, dark suit, new shoes, and an up-to-date straw hat. The suitcase that jostled her shabby telescope valise would have done credit to a Chicago travelling salesman. “You’re going to take the train,” she suggested. “To Cheyenne,” he answered. “Why, I’m going to Laramie, if——” She cut her sentence short. It was not to be presumed that he cared where she was going. Moreover, she could not finish without telling more than she wanted to. But McCoy guessed the condition. She would go if she could borrow at Wagon Wheel the money for a ticket. They drove into the county seat long before train time.