“You—­are yo’ lying to me?” she asked faintly, and oh, but she would have given much to hear the girl’s impish laugh of assent.  Instead, she saw Nella-Rose’s eyes grow deadly serious.

“It’s no lie, Miss Lois Ann; it’s a right beautiful truth.”

“And for days and nights you stayed alone with this man?”

The lean hand, with unrelenting strength, now gripped the drooping face and held it firmly while the firelight played full upon it, meanwhile the keen old eyes bored into Nella-Rose’s very soul.

“But he—­he is my man!  You forget the—­marrying on the hill, Miss Lois Ann!”

The voice was raised a bit and the colour left the trembling lips.

“Your man!” And a bitter laugh rang out wildly.

“Stop, Miss Lois Ann!  Yo’ shall not look at me like that!”

The vision was dulled—­Nella-Rose shivered.

“You shall not look at me like that; God would not—­why should you?”

“God!”—­the cracked voice spoke the word bitterly.  “God!  What does God care for women?  It’s the men as God made things for, and us-all has to fend them off—­men and God are agin us women!”

“No, no!  Let me free.  I was so happy until—­Oh!  Miss Lois Ann, you shall not take my happiness away.”

“Yo’ came to the right place, yo’ po’ lil’ chile.”

The eyes had seen all they needed to see and the hand let drop the pretty, quivering face.

“We’ll wait—­oh! certainly we-all will wait a week; two weeks; then three.  An’ we-all will hide close and see what we-all shall see!” A hard, pitiful laugh echoed through the room.  “And now to bed!  Take the closet back o’ my chamber.  No one can reach yo’ there, chile.  Sleep and dream and—­forget.”

And that night Burke Lawson, after an hour’s struggle, determined to come forth among his kind and take his place.  Nella-Rose had decided him.  He was tired of hiding, tired of playing his game.  One look at the face he had loved from its babyhood had turned the tide.  Lawson had never before been so long shut away from his guiding star.  And she had said that he might ask again when he dared—­and so he came forth from his cave-place.  Once outside, he drew a deep, free breath, turned his handsome face to the sky, and felt the prayer that another might have voiced.

He thought of Nella-Rose, remembered her love of adventure, her splendid courage and spirit.  Nothing so surely could win her as the proposal he was about to make.  To ask her to remain at Pine Cone and settle down with him as her hill-billy would hold small temptation, but to take her away to new and wider fields—­that was another matter!  And go they would—­he and she.  He would get a horse somewhere, somehow.  With Nella-Rose behind him, he would never stop until a parson was reached, and after that—­why the world would be theirs from which to choose.

And it was at that point of Lawson’s fervid, religious state that Jed Martin had materialized and made it imperative that he be dealt with summarily and definitely.