“Gila, you will tell Lew Tennelly everything, or you will never marry him!  It is his right to know!  And now, sir”—­Courtland turned to Aquilar, lounging amusedly against the doorway—­“if you will step outside I will settle with you!”

But suddenly Gila gave a scream and covered her face with her hands, for there, just behind Aquilar, stood Tennelly, looking like a ghost.  He had heard it all!

CHAPTER XXXI

Tennelly stepped within the room, gave one keen, questioning look at Aquilar as he passed him, searching straight into the depths of his startled, shifty eyes, and came and stood before the crouching girl.  She had dropped into a chair and was sobbing as if her heart would break.

“What does this mean, Gila?”

Tennelly’s voice was cold and stern.

Courtland looked at his shocked face and turned away from the pain of it.  But when he looked for the man who had wrought this havoc he had suddenly melted from the room!  The front door was blowing back and forth in the wind, and the clerk and bell-boy stood, open-mouthed, staring.  Courtland closed the door of the reception-room and hurried out on the veranda, but saw no sign of any one in the wind-swept darkness.  The moon had risen enough to make a bright path over the sea, but the earth as yet was wrapped in shadow.

Down in the field, beyond the outbuildings, he heard a whirring sound, and as he looked a dark thing rose like a great bird high above his head.  The bird had flown while the flying was good.  The lady might face her difficulties alone!

Courtland stood below in the courtyard, while the moon arose and shed its light through the sky, and the great black bird executed an evolution or two and whirred off to the north, doubtless headed for Seattle or some equally inaccessible point.  A great helpless wrath was upon him.  Dolt that he had been to let this human leper escape from him into the world again!  A kind of divine frenzy seized him to capture him yet and put him where he could work no further harm to other willing victims.  Yes, he thought of Gila as a willing victim!  An hour before he would have called her just plain innocent victim.  Now something in her face, her attitude, as she saw him and walked away with her guilty partner, had made him know her at last for a sinful woman.  The shackles had burst from his heart and he was free from her allurements for evermore!  He understood now why she had bade him choose between herself and Christ.  She had no part nor lot in things pure and holy.  She hated holiness because she herself was sinful!

It was midnight before Gila and Tennelly came forth, Tennelly grave and sad, Gila tear-stained and subdued.

Courtland was sitting in the big chair before the fireplace, though the fire was smoldering low, and the elevator-boy had long ago retired to slumbers on a bench in a hidden alcove.