And, Jack, you forget—­riding over the pass so grandly with your impulses, as if to want a thing is to get it—­you—­but we have had good times together; and, as I said, you belong on one side of the pass and I on the other.  This and much else, which one cannot see or define, is between us.  From the day you came, some forbidding influence seemed at work in my father’s life and mine; and when you had gone another man, with your features and your smile, came to Little Rivers; one that I understand even less than you!”

Jack recalled the references to the new rancher by Bob Worther on the day of his departure for the East and, later, in Jim Galway’s letter.  But he did not speak.  Something more compelling than his promise was keeping him silent:  her own apprehension, with its story of phantoms of her own.

“And yesterday I saw your father’s face,” she went on, “as it appeared in the doorway for a second before he saw my father and was struck with fear, and how like yours it was—­but more like John Prather’s.  And the high-sounding preachments about the poverty that might go with fine gowns became real to me.  They were not banal at all.  They were simple truth, free of rhetoric and pretence.  I knew that my cry of ’It’s not in the blood’ was as true in me as any impulse of yours ever could be in you!”

To the end, under the dominance of her will, she had not faltered; and with the end she looked up with a faint smile of stoicism and an invincible flame in her eyes.  Anything that he might be able to say would be as flashing a blade in and out of a blaze.  She had become superior to the resources of barrier or armor, confident of a self whose richness he realized anew.  He saw and felt the tempered fineness of her as something that would mind neither siege nor prayer.

“I am not afraid,” she said, “and I know that you are not.  It is all right!” Then she added, with a desperate coolness, but still clasping the boa rigidly:  “The hotel is only a block away, and to-morrow you will be back in the store and I shall soon be on my side of the pass.”

This was her right word for a situation when his temples were throbbing, harking back, with time’s reversal of conditions, to a situation after the duel in the arroyo was over and he had used the right word when her temples were throbbing and her hands splashed.  If retribution were her object, she had repaid in nerve-twitch of torture for nerve-twitch of torture.  The picture that had been alive and out of its frame was back on cold canvas.  Even the girl he had known across the barrier, even the girl in armor, seemed more kindly.  But one can talk, even to a picture in a frame; at least, Jack could, with wistful persistence.

“You don’t mind if I tell you again—­if I speak my one continuous thought aloud again?” he asked.  “Mary, I love you!  I love you in such a way that I”—­with a faint bravery of humor as he saw danger signals—­“I would build mud-houses all day for you to knock to pieces!”