Outside the guard slowly passed back and forth.  Sylvia did not speak; her seeming inattention vexed and perplexed him.  He thought her lacking in appreciation of his frankness.

“Thatcher knows much of this story, but he doesn’t know the whole,” he went on.  “He believes it was irregular.  He’s been keeping it back to spring as a sensation.  He’s told those men out there that he can break me; that at the last minute he will crush me.  They’re waiting for me now—­Thatcher and his crowd; probably chuckling to think how at last they’ve got me cornered.  That’s the situation.  They think they’re about rid of Morton Bassett.”

“You left her; you deserted her; you left her to die alone, unprotected, without even a name.  You accepted her loyalty and fidelity, and then threw her aside; you slunk away alone to her grave to be sure she wouldn’t trouble you again.  Oh, it is black, it is horrible!”

Sylvia was looking at him with a kind of awed wonder in her eyes.  For an instant there had been a faint suggestion of contrition in his tone, but it was overwhelmed by his desire for self-justification.  It was of himself he was thinking, not of the deed in itself, not of the woman he had left to bear her child in an alien wilderness.

“I tried to do what I could for you.  I want you to know that.  I meant to have cared for you, that no harm should come to you,” he said, and the words jarred upon his own ears as he spoke them.

In her face there was less of disdain than of marvel.  He wished to escape from her eyes, but they held him fast.  Messengers ran hurriedly through the corridors; men passed the door talking in tones faintly audible; but the excitement in the rival camps communicated nothing of its intensity to this quiet chamber.  Men had feared Morton Bassett; this girl, with her wondering dark eyes, did not fear him.  But he was following a course he had planned for this meeting, and he dared not shift his ground.

“I don’t want you to think that I haven’t been grieved to see you working for your living; I never meant that you should do that.  Hereafter that will be unnecessary; but I am busy to-night.  To-morrow, at any time you say, we will talk of those things.”

There was dismissal in his manner and tone.  He was anxious to be rid of her.  The color deepened in her olive cheeks, but she bent upon him once more her patient, wondering, baffling smile.

“Please never propose such a thing again, Mr. Bassett.  There is absolutely nothing of that kind that you can do for me.”

“You want to make it hard for me; but I hope you will think better of that.  It is right that I should make the only reparation that is possible now.”

This rang so false and was so palpably insincere that he was relieved when she ignored it.

“You said a moment ago that your enemies, waiting out there, thought they had you beaten.  I want you to tell me just how you propose to meet Mr. Thatcher’s threat.”