“I never thought—­till now.”

“Well, what’s your choice—­to go—­or to stay here—­alone with me?”

“Stay!” New-born thought of self, ringing vibrantly in her voice, gave her answer singular power.

Venters trembled, and then swiftly turned his gaze from her face—­from her eyes.  He knew what she had only half divined—­that she loved him.

CHAPTER XI.  FAITH AND UNFAITH

At Jane Withersteen’s home the promise made to Mrs. Larkin to care for little Fay had begun to be fulfilled.  Like a gleam of sunlight through the cottonwoods was the coming of the child to the gloomy house of Withersteen.  The big, silent halls echoed with childish laughter.  In the shady court, where Jane spent many of the hot July days, Fay’s tiny feet pattered over the stone flags and splashed in the amber stream.  She prattled incessantly.  What difference, Jane thought, a child made in her home!  It had never been a real home, she discovered.  Even the tidiness and neatness she had so observed, and upon which she had insisted to her women, became, in the light of Fay’s smile, habits that now lost their importance.  Fay littered the court with Jane’s books and papers, and other toys her fancy improvised, and many a strange craft went floating down the little brook.

And it was owing to Fay’s presence that Jane Withersteen came to see more of Lassiter.  The rider had for the most part kept to the sage.  He rode for her, but he did not seek her except on business; and Jane had to acknowledge in pique that her overtures had been made in vain.  Fay, however, captured Lassiter the moment he first laid eyes on her.

Jane was present at the meeting, and there was something about it which dimmed her sight and softened her toward this foe of her people.  The rider had clanked into the court, a tired yet wary man, always looking for the attack upon him that was inevitable and might come from any quarter; and he had walked right upon little Fay.  The child had been beautiful even in her rags and amid the surroundings of the hovel in the sage, but now, in a pretty white dress, with her shining curls brushed and her face clean and rosy, she was lovely.  She left her play and looked up at Lassiter.

If there was not an instinct for all three of them in that meeting, an unreasoning tendency toward a closer intimacy, then Jane Withersteen believed she had been subject to a queer fancy.  She imagined any child would have feared Lassiter.  And Fay Larkin had been a lonely, a solitary elf of the sage, not at all an ordinary child, and exquisitely shy with strangers.  She watched Lassiter with great, round, grave eyes, but showed no fear.  The rider gave Jane a favorable report of cattle and horses; and as he took the seat to which she invited him, little Fay edged as much as half an inch nearer.  Jane replied to his look of inquiry and told Fay’s story.  The rider’s gray, earnest gaze troubled