“I’ll find him,” I replied turning away.

Steele was readily found and came back with me.  He was as unlike himself as she was strange.  But when they again faced each other, then they were indeed new to me.

“I want to know—­what you must do,” she said.  Steele told her briefly, and his voice was stern.

“Those—­those criminals outside of my own family don’t concern me now.  But can my father and cousin be taken without bloodshed?  I want to know the absolute truth.”  Steele knew that they could not be, but he could not tell her so.  Again she appealed to me.  Thus my part in the situation grew harder.  It hurt me so that it made me angry, and my anger made me cruelly frank.

“No.  It can’t be done.  Sampson and Wright will be desperately hard to approach, which’ll make the chances even.  So, if you must know the truth, it’ll be your father and cousin to go under, or it’ll be Steele or me, or any combination luck breaks—­or all of us!”

Her self-control seemed to fly to the four winds.  Swift as light she flung herself down before Steele, against his knees, clasped her arms round him.  “Good God!  Miss Sampson, you mustn’t do that!” implored Steele.  He tried to break her hold with shaking hands, but he could not.

“Listen!  Listen!” she cried, and her voice made Steele, and Sally and me also, still as the rock behind us.  “Hear me!  Do you think I beg you to let my father go, for his sake?  No!  No!  I have gloried in your Ranger duty.  I have loved you because of it.  But some awful tragedy threatens here.  Listen, Vaughn Steele.  Do not you deny me, as I kneel here.  I love you.  I never loved any other man.  But not for my love do I beseech you.

“There is no help here unless you forswear your duty.  Forswear it!  Do not kill my father—­the father of the woman who loves you.  Worse and more horrible it would be to let my father kill you!  It’s I who make this situation unnatural, impossible.  You must forswear your duty.  I can live no longer if you don’t.  I pray you—­” Her voice had sunk to a whisper, and now it failed.  Then she seemed to get into his arms, to wind herself around him, her hair loosened, her face upturned, white and spent, her arms blindly circling his neck.  She was all love, all surrender, all supreme appeal, and these, without her beauty, would have made her wonderful.  But her beauty!  Would not Steele have been less than a man or more than a man had he been impervious to it?  She was like some snow-white exquisite flower, broken, and suddenly blighted.  She was a woman then in all that made a woman helpless—­in all that made her mysterious, sacred, absolutely and unutterably more than any other thing in life.  All this time my gaze had been riveted on her only.  But when she lifted her white face, tried to lift it, rather, and he drew her up, and then when both white faces met and seemed to blend in something rapt, awesome, tragic as life—­then I saw Steele.