to face any punishment for the wrong he had done her.  Her brother, too, pointed the same moral.  He had defied the enemy, though he had been in his power.  Not one of them would have done what Tom Dixon, in his panic terror, had allowed himself to do.  But they were men, all of them—­men of that stark courage that clings to self-respect rather than to life.  This youth had met the acid test, and had failed in the assay.  She had no anger toward him—­only a kindly pity, and a touch of contempt which she could not help.

“No—­I don’t blame you, Tom,” she told him, very kindly.  “But I can’t marry you.  I couldn’t if you explained till Christmas.  That is final.  Now let us be friends.”

She held out her hand.  He looked at it through the tears of mortification that were in his eyes, dashed it aside with an oath, swung to the saddle, and galloped down the road.

Phyllis gave a wistful sigh.  Tears filmed her eyes.  He was her first lover, had given her apples and candy hearts when he was in the third grade and she learning her A, B, C. So she felt a heartache to see him go like this.  Their friendship was shattered, too.  Nor had she experience enough to know that this could not have endured, save as a form, after the wrench he had given it.  Yet she knew him well enough now to be sure that it was his vanity and self-esteem that were hurt, and not his love.  He would soon find consolation among the other ranch girls, upon whom he had been used to lavish his attentions at intervals when she was not handy to receive them.

“Was Tom Dixon mean to you, teacher?”

Little five-year-old Jimmie Tryon was standing before her, feet apart, fists knotted, and brow furrowed.  She swooped upon her champion and snatched him up for a kiss.

“Nobody has been mean to teacher, Jimmie, you dear little kiddikins,” she cried.  “It’s all right, honey.  Tom thinks it isn’t, but before long he’ll know it is.”

“Who’ll tell him?” Jimmie wanted to know anxiously.

“Some nice girl, little curiosity box.  I don’t know who yet, but it will be one of two or three I could name,” she laughed.

She harnessed the horse and hitched it to the trap in which Jimmie and she came to school.  But before she had gathered up the reins to start, another young man strolled upon the scene.

This one was walking and carried a rifle.

At sight of him a glow began to burn through her dark cheeks.  They had not been alone together before since that moment when the stress of their emotion had swept them to a meeting of warm lips and warm bodies that had startled her by the electric pulsing of her blood.

Her eyes could not hold to his.  Shame dragged the lashes down.

With him it was not shame.  The male in him rode triumphant because he had moved a girl to the deeps of her nature.  But something in him, some saving sense of embarrassment, of reverence for the purity and innocence he sensed in her, made him shrink from pressing the victory.  His mind cast about for a commonplace with which to meet her.