He came a step closer and the firelight showed how the muscles of his throat were working.  Gloria’s eyes widened.  But not yet did she fully understand and not yet did she fear.

“Mr. Gratton,” she began.

“Gloria!” he cried out.  “Gloria!”

His hands, suddenly flung out, were upon her.  She tore them away, wrenched herself free from him, and started back.  As she did so her little silken bundle dropped at her feet.  Gratton caught it up and buried his face in it.  Now as he looked up at her his eyes and all that she could see of his face were stamped with that which lay in his heart.

“Oh!” she cried, shrinking not so much from him as from the thing she read so plainly at last.  “Surely, you do not think ... you do not misinterpret ... my being here at all, my being with Mr. King....”

“No,” cried Gratton wildly.  “I misinterpret nothing.  You came alone with him into the mountains.  What chance is there for two interpretations there?  You gave yourself to him; you saw your mistake; you hated him.  You have come to me.  I have always loved you; I want you.”

Her cheeks flamed red with hot anger.  There was a flutter in her heart, a wild tremor in her blood.  She drew back from him.  He followed, his arms out.  She was amazed, for the moment shocked into consternation.  And yet she knew no such terror as had been hers when King had advanced on her, rope in hand.  Her new contempt of Gratton was too high for that.  Now she marked the small stature, little taller, little stronger, than her own; the pale face, the narrow chest, the slender body.

“You know what I mean, what I want,” he was muttering.  “That sweet young-thing innocence is all right in its place but that place is not here alone in the mountains with a man.”

“Man!” she burst out scathingly.  “You, a man!  Why, you wretched little beast!”

But Gratton, his brain reeling with hot fancy, came on.

“You were afraid of King.  You said that he made you do what he wanted.  What about me?  You are going to do what I tell you.  I ...By God, I will make you!  Beast, you call me?  No more beast than any other man.  I have wanted you all these years.  You have wanted me, or you would not have been so glad to see me.  Only a few days ago you were ready to marry me!  And now ...”

His arms groped for her.  Gloria swept up a dead pine limb that lay by the fire and swung it in both hands and struck him full across the face.  He reeled back and stood, half in the shadow, his shoulders to the rock wall, his hands to his face.

“You beast!” she panted.  “You cowardly, contemptible beast.”

From the way in which he brought his hand down and looked at it and laid it back upon his lips she knew that his mouth was bleeding.  And she read in the gesture and in the man’s whole cringing attitude that the danger of any physical violence from him was past and done with.  In the grip of his passion, ugly as it was, he had risen somewhat from his essential weakness; in the moment he had at least thought of himself as a conqueror.  Now he was again what he always really was at heart, a contemptible coward.