“Miss Hammond.  Are you awake?”

“Awake and dressed, Miss Kingsley.  Come in.”

“Oh!  You’ve rested.  You look so—­so different.  I’m sure glad.  Come out now.  We’ll have breakfast, and then you may expect to meet your brother any moment.”

“Wait, please.  I heard you speaking to Mr. Stewart.  It was unavoidable.  But I am glad.  I must see him.  Will you please ask him to come into the parlor a moment?”

“Yes,” replied Florence, quickly; and as she turned at the door she flashed at Madeline a woman’s meaning glance.  “Make him keep his mouth shut!”

Presently there were slow, reluctant steps outside the front door, then a pause, and the door opened.  Stewart stood bareheaded in the sunlight.  Madeline remembered with a kind of shudder the tall form, the embroidered buckskin vest, the red scarf, the bright leather wristbands, the wide silver-buckled belt and chaps.  Her glance seemed to run over him swift as lightning.  But as she saw his face now she did not recognize it.  The man’s presence roused in her a revolt.  Yet something in her, the incomprehensible side of her nature, thrilled in the look of this splendid dark-faced barbarian.

“Mr. Stewart, will you please come in?” she asked, after that long pause.

“I reckon not,” he said.  The hopelessness of his tone meant that he knew he was not fit to enter a room with her, and did not care or cared too much.

Madeline went to the door.  The man’s face was hard, yet it was sad, too.  And it touched her.

“I shall not tell my brother of your—­your rudeness to me,” she began.  It was impossible for her to keep the chill out of her voice, to speak with other than the pride and aloofness of her class.  Nevertheless, despite her loathing, when she had spoken so far it seemed that kindness and pity followed involuntarily.  “I choose to overlook what you did because you were not wholly accountable, and because there must be no trouble between Alfred and you.  May I rely on you to keep silence and to seal the lips of that priest?  And you know there was a man killed or injured there last night.  I want to forget that dreadful thing.  I don’t want it known that I heard—­”

“The Greaser didn’t die,” interrupted Stewart.

“Ah! then that’s not so bad, after all.  I am glad for the sake of your friend—­the little Mexican girl.”

A slow scarlet wave overspread his face, and his shame was painful to see.  That fixed in Madeline’s mind a conviction that if he was a heathen he was not wholly bad.  And it made so much difference that she smiled down at him.

“You will spare me further distress, will you not, please?” His hoarse reply was incoherent, but she needed only to see his working face to know his remorse and gratitude.