He felt sure there was a way out from her fretted life for this deep-breasted, supple daughter of the hills if she could only find it.  She had breathed an atmosphere that made for suspicion and harshness.  All her years she had been forced to fight to save herself from shame.  But Roy, as he looked at her, imaged another picture of Beulah Rutherford.  Little children clung to her knees and called her “Mother.”  She bent over them tenderly, her face irradiated with love.  A man whose features would not come clear strode toward her and the eyes she lifted to his were pools of light.

Beaudry drew a deep breath and looked away from her into the fire.  “I wish time would solve my problem as surely as it will yours,” he said.

She looked at him eagerly, lips parted, but she would not in words invite his confession.

The young man shaded his eyes with his hand as if to screen them from the fire, but she noticed that the back of his hand hid them from her, too.  He found a difficulty in beginning.  When at last he spoke, his voice was rough with feeling.

“Of course, you’ll despise me—­you of all people.  How could you help it?”

Her body leaned toward him ever so slightly.  Love lit her face like a soft light.

“Shall I?  How do you know?”

“It cuts so deep—­goes to the bottom of things.  If a fellow is wild or even bad, he may redeem himself.  But you can’t make a man out of a yellow cur.  The stuff isn’t there.”  The words came out jerkily as if with some physical difficulty.

“If you mean about coming up to the park, I know about that,” she said gently.  “Mr. Dingwell told father.  I think it was splendid of you.”

“No, that isn’t it.  I knew I was right in coming and that some day you would understand.”  He dropped the hand from his face and looked straight at her.  “Dave didn’t tell your father that I had to be flogged into going, did he?  He didn’t tell him that I tried to dodge out of it with excuses.”

“Of course, you weren’t anxious to throw up your own affairs and run into danger for a man you had never met.  Why should you be wild for the chance.  But you went.”

“Oh, I went.  I had to go.  Ryan put it up to me so that there was no escape,” was his dogged, almost defiant, answer.

“I know better,” the girl corrected quickly.  “You put it up to yourself.  You’re that way.”

“Am I?” He flashed a questioning look at her.  “Then, since you know that, perhaps you know, too, what—­what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Perhaps I do,” she whispered softly to the fire.

There was panic in his eyes. “—­That . . . that I—­”

“—­That you are sensitive and have a good deal of imagination,” the girl concluded gently.

“No, I’ll not feed my vanity with pleasant lies to-night.”  He gave a little gesture of self-scorn as he rose to throw some dry sticks on the fire.  “What I mean and what you mean is that—­that I’m an arrant coward.”  Roy gulped the last words out as if they burned his throat.