After a moment she commenced to sing very softly, in unison with the music of the waves along the keel,

“How dear to me the hour when daylight dies.”

Even subdued, her voice was beautiful.  It began surely, insistently, to undermine all that stout breastwork he had reared against her these twenty-four hours.  But he thrust his hands in his pockets and turned to her with that upward look of probing, upbraiding eyes.

The song died.  A flush rose over her face, but she met the look bravely.  “I came to explain,” she said.  “I thought at the beginning, when we started on that drive through the mountains, you knew my identity.  Afterwards I tried repeatedly to tell you, but when I saw how bitterly you—­hated—­me, my courage failed.”

Her lip trembled over a sighing breath, and she looked, away up the brilliant sea.  Tisdale could not doubt her.  His mind raced back to incident on incident of that journey; in flashes it was all made clear to him.  Even during that supreme hour of the electrical storm had she not tried to undeceive him?  He forgave her her transgressions against him; he forgave her so completely that, at the recollection of the one moment in the basin, his pulses sang.  Then, inside his pockets, his hands clenched, and he scourged himself for the lapse.

“I was in desperate need,” she went on quickly.  “There was a debt—­a debt of honor—­I wished to pay.  And Mr. Foster told me you were interested in that desert land; that you were going to look it over.  He caught me by long distance telephone the night he sailed for Alaska, to let me know.  Oh, it all sounds sordid, but if you have ever come to the ragged edge of things—­”

She stopped, with a little outward, deprecating movement of her hands, and turned again to meet Tisdale’s look.  But he was still silent.  “I believed when you knew me,” she went on, “you would see I am not the kind of woman you imagined; I even hoped, for David’s sake, you would forgive me.  But I did not know there was such friendship as yours in the world.  I thought only mothers loved so,—­the great ones, the Hagars, the Marys.  It is more than that; it is the best and deepest of every kind of love in one.  I can’t fathom it—­unless—­men sometimes are born with twin souls.”

It was not the influence of her personality now; it was not any magnetism.  Something far down in the depths of him responded to that something in her.  It was as though he felt the white soul of her rising transcendent over her body.  It spoke in her pose, her eloquent face, and it filled the brief silence with an insistent, almost vibrant appeal.

“They are,” he answered, and the emotion in his own face played softly through his voice, “I am sure that they are.  Weatherbee had other friends, plenty of them, scattered from the Yukon territory to Nome; men who would have been glad to go out of their way to serve him, if they had known; but he never asked anything of them; he saved the right to call on me.  Neither of us ever came as near that ‘ragged edge of things’ as he did, toppled on it as he did, for so long.  There never was a braver fight, against greater odds, single-handed, yet I failed him.”  He paused while his eyes again sought that high gorge of the Olympic Mountains, then added:  “The most I can do now is to see that his work is carried on.”