She felt something hard and cold and metallic thrust into her hand.  He made her fingers close over it, hold it.  The feel of the thing revived her.  She opened her eyes.  Stewart had given her his gun.  He stood with his broad breast against her knee, and she looked up to see that old mocking smile on his face.

“Go ahead!  Throw my gun on me!  Be a thoroughbred!”

Madeline did not yet grasp his meaning.

“You can put me down in that quiet place on the hill—­beside Monty Price.”

Madeline dropped the gun with a shuddering cry of horror.  The sense of his words, the memory of Monty, the certainty that she would kill Stewart if she held the gun an instant longer, tortured the self-accusing cry from her.

Stewart stooped to pick up the weapon.

“You might have saved me a hell of a lot of trouble,” he said, with another flash of the mocking smile.  “You’re beautiful and sweet and proud, but you’re no thoroughbred!  Majesty Hammond, adios!”

Stewart leaped for the saddle of his horse, and with the flying mount crashed through the mesquites to disappear.

XXII The Secret Told

In the shaded seclusion of her room, buried face down deep among the soft cushions on her couch, Madeline Hammond lay prostrate and quivering under the outrage she had suffered.

The afternoon wore away; twilight fell; night came; and then Madeline rose to sit by the window to let the cool wind blow upon her hot face.  She passed through hours of unintelligible shame and impotent rage and futile striving to reason away her defilement.

The train of brightening stars seemed to mock her with their unattainable passionless serenity.  She had loved them, and now she imagined she hated them and everything connected with this wild, fateful, and abrupt West.

She would go home.

Edith Wayne had been right; the West was no place for Madeline Hammond.  The decision to go home came easily, naturally, she thought, as the result of events.  It caused her no mental strife.  Indeed, she fancied she felt relief.  The great stars, blinking white and cold over the dark crags, looked down upon her, and, as always, after she had watched them for a while they enthralled her.  “Under Western stars,” she mused, thinking a little scornfully of the romantic destiny they had blazed for her idle sentiment.  But they were beautiful; they were speaking; they were mocking; they drew her.  “Ah!” she sighed.  “It will not be so very easy to leave them, after all.”

Madeline closed and darkened the window.  She struck a light.  It was necessary to tell the anxious servants who knocked that she was well and required nothing.  A soft step on the walk outside arrested her.  Who was there—­Nels or Nick Steele or Stillwell?  Who shared the guardianship over her, now that Monty Price was dead and that other—­that savage—?  It was monstrous and unfathomable that she regretted him.