“Will you take back your horse, please?” she said, choking over these sobs which hurt her more at the moment than he had hurt her.  “I’ll never ride on him again.  Don’t come back here.  Don’t try to see me any more.  I suppose it—­it—­the way you love me—­is because I was a barmaid, because you heard people speak of me as ‘Hudson’s Queen.’” She conquered one of the sobs.  “I thought that after you’d looked into my face so hard that night and stopped yourself from—­from—­my lips, that you had understood.”  She shook her head from side to side so violently, so childishly, that the short hair lashed across her eyes.  “No one ever will understand!” She ran away from him and cried under her breath, “Dickie!  Dickie!”

She ran straight into the living-room and stopped in the middle of the floor.  Her arms were full of the flowers she had pulled down from “Nigger Baby’s” neck.

“What did you want to bring in all that truck—?” Miss Blake began, rising from the pianola, then stopped.  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.  “Did your young man find you?  I sent him up the trail.”  Her red eyes sparkled.

“He insulted me!” gasped Sheila.  “He dared to insult me!” She was dramatic with her helpless young rage.  “He said I wasn’t fit to—­to be the mother of his children.  And”—­she laughed angrily, handling behind Cosme’s back the weapon that she had been too merciful to use—­“and his mother is a murderess, found guilty of murder—­and of worse!”

A sort of ripple of sound behind made her turn.

Cosme had followed her, was standing in the open door, and had heard her speech.  The weapon had struck home, and she saw how it had poisoned all his blood.

He vanished without a word.  Sheila turned back to Miss Blake a paler face.  She let fall all her flowers.

“Now he’ll never come back,” she said.

She climbed up the ladder to her loft.

There she sat for an hour, listening to the silence.  Her mind busied itself with trivial memories.  She thought of Amelia Plecks....  It would have comforted her to hear that knock and the rattle of her dinner tray.  The little sitting-room at Hudson’s Hotel, with its bit of tapestry and its yellow tea-set and its vases filled with flowers, seemed to her memory as elaborate and artificial as the boudoir of a French princess.  Farther than Millings had seemed from her old life did this dark little gabled attic seem from Millings.  What was to be the end of this strange wandering, this withdrawing of herself farther and farther into the lonely places!  She longed for the noise of Babe’s hearty, irrepressible voice with its smack of chewing, of her step coming up the stairs to that little bedroom under Hudson’s gaudy roof.  Could it be possible that she was homesick for Millings?  For the bar with its lights and its visitors and its big-aproned guardian?  Her lids were actually smarting with tears at the recollection of Carthy’s big Irish face....