“That’s nothing,” he said, with something of his old audacity.  “That’s nothing to how you’ve hurt me.”

Madeline battled with herself for control.  This man would not be denied.  Never before had the hardness of his face, the flinty hardness of these desert-bred men, so struck her with its revelation of the unbridled spirit.  He looked stern, haggard, bitter.  The dark shade was changing to gray—­the gray to ash-color of passion.  About him now there was only the ghost of that finer, gentler man she had helped to bring into being.  The piercing dark eyes he bent upon her burned her, went through her as if he were looking into her soul.  Then Madeline’s quick sight caught a fleeting doubt, a wistfulness, a surprised and saddened certainty in his eyes, saw it shade and pass away.  Her woman’s intuition, as keen as her sight, told her Stewart in that moment had sustained a shock of bitter, final truth.

For the third time he repeated his question to her.  Madeline did not answer; she could not speak.

“You don’t know I love you, do you?” he continued, passionately.  “That ever since you stood before me in that hole at Chiricahua I’ve loved you?  You can’t see I’ve been another man, loving you, working for you, living for you?  You won’t believe I’ve turned my back on the old wild life, that I’ve been decent and honorable and happy and useful—­your kind of a cowboy?  You couldn’t tell, though I loved you, that I never wanted you to know it, that I never dared to think of you except as my angel, my holy Virgin?  What do you know of a man’s heart and soul?  How could you tell of the love, the salvation of a man who’s lived his life in the silence and loneliness?  Who could teach you the actual truth—­ that a wild cowboy, faithless to mother and sister, except in memory, riding a hard, drunken trail straight to hell; had looked into the face, the eyes of a beautiful woman infinitely beyond him, above him, and had so loved her that he was saved—­that he became faithful again—­that he saw her face in every flower and her eyes in the blue heaven?  Who could tell you, when at night I stood alone under these Western stars, how deep in my soul I was glad just to be alive, to be able to do something for you, to be near you, to stand between you and worry, trouble, danger, to feel somehow that I was a part, just a little part of the West you had come to love?”

Madeline was mute.  She heard her heart thundering in her ears.

Stewart leaped at her.  His powerful hand closed on her arm.  She trembled.  His action presaged the old instinctive violence.

“No; but you think I kept Bonita up in the mountains, that I went secretly to meet her, that all the while I served you I was—­ Oh, I know what you think!  I know now.  I never knew till I made you look at me.  Now, say it!  Speak!”

White-hot, blinded, utterly in the fiery grasp of passion, powerless to stem the rush of a word both shameful and revealing and fatal, Madeline cried: