“Confess, Miss Weyland.  You’re as tired as you can be.”

She turned her head, and smiled a little into his eyes.  “Yes—­you don’t mind, do you?”

“Indeed I do, though!  You’re going altogether too hard—­working like a Trojan all day and dancing like a dryad all night.  You’ll break yourself down—­indeed you will!”

Hardly conscious of it herself, Sharlee had been waiting with a tense anxiety of which her face began to give signs, for him to speak.  And now she understood that he would not speak; and she knew why....  How her heart warmed to him for his honorable silence in defense of his unworthy friend.

But she herself was under no such restraint.  “It isn’t that,” she said quickly.  “It’s the reformatory—­I’ve worried myself sick over it.”

West averted his gaze; he saw that it had come, and in a peculiarly aggravated form.  He recognized at once how impossible it would be to talk the matter over, in a calm and rational way, under such conditions as these.  This little girl had brooded over it till the incident had assumed grotesque and fantastic proportions in her mind.  She was seeing visions, having nightmares.  In a soothing, sympathetic voice, he began consoling her with the thought that a postponement for two brief years was really not so serious, and that—­

“It isn’t that!” she corrected him again, in the same voice.  “That was pretty bad, but—­what I have minded so much was M——­ was the Post’s desertion.”

West’s troubled eyes fell.  But some hovering imp of darkness instantly popped it into his head to ask:  “Have you seen Queed?”

“No,” said Sharlee, colorlessly.  “Not since—­”

“You—­didn’t know, then, that he has left the Post?”

“Left the Post!” she echoed, with a face suddenly rigid.  “No!  Did he?  Won’t you tell me—?”

West looked unhappily at the floor.  “Well—­I’d much rather not go into this now.  But the fact is that he left because ... well, we had a difference of opinion as to that reformatory article.”

Sharlee turned hastily away, pretending to look for her fan.  The sudden shutting of that tiny door had shot her through with unexpected pain.  The last doubt fell now; all was plain.  Mr. Queed had been discharged for writing an article which outraged his chief’s sense of honor, that knightly young chief who still would not betray him by a word.  The little door clicked; Sharlee turned the key upon it and threw away the key.  And then she turned upon West a face so luminous with pure trust that it all but unsteadied him.