‘She was wrong—­wrong!’ he protested.

’Not a bit, boy!  ’Twas the pure girl had all your soul.  Heavens! and how you rubbed it in about her purity and goodness!  Mother of us! let a man be so infernally bad that the very fiend sniffs at him, but he’ll bargain with the impudence of an archangel for the pure girl.’

‘And she went away for this?’

’Sure enough.  Aurora’s the sort to hide her hurts.  When she can’t fight over them, she’ll not cry a whimper.’

‘That’s true; and I’ve hurt her deepest of all.’

Mary detected the expression of his face with quick alarm.  She had said too much.

‘There, there, Jimmy boy,’ she said anxiously; ’we mustn’t be forgetting that Joy’s the strong sort.  She’ll come again, fresh and rosy and merry as ever—­bet your life on it.’

Jim went into the tent that had been his sick-room, and sat for over an hour in deep thought, and his thoughts were all of Aurora.  He missed her—­missed her at every turn, and in every hour of his convalescence.  As a reward for her love and tenderness, he had afflicted her with the greatest bitterness her brave heart could bear.  His eyes were fixed upon the floor, and eventually discovered two oval objects half buried in the hard earth.  He stooped to pick them up, and found them to be the halves of the locket that contained Lucy Woodrow’s miniature.  The case had been stamped into the floor with the heel of a boot, the pieces were torn apart, and the portrait ground off the ivory on which it was painted.  With the fragments of the locket in his hand, Jim pursued a new train of thought, but there was no comfort in it.  He recalled Joy’s words:  ’I won’t bind the strange man you may be to-morrow.’  Her love had been too strong for her philosophy.  What of his?  Had he ever seriously considered the possibilities of a life wholly apart from her?  His mind flew to Lucy, but by no effort could he devote his thoughts to either of the women who had so deeply influenced him.

It was no longer possible to keep the truth about Mike Burton from the invalid, and Mary broke the news to him as gently as she could, The shock seemed to stun Jim’s sensibilities for a time.  As the numbness wore off, a bitter, blind hatred grew in his heart against the men he chose to regard as Mike’s murderers, and he had a ferocious longing for vengeance.  Again law and order, the forces of society, had intervened to embitter him.  His subsequent sorrow over his mate was deep and lasting.  He felt now that although their friendship had been free of demonstrativeness, it had been warmed with a generous sincerity.

Done awakened one day, with some sense of fear, to the knowledge that he was drifting back into a morbid condition.  He found he had bred a disposition to brood over his weakness.  The loss of Mike and the disappearance of Aurora were becoming grievances that he cherished with youthful unreason.  He determined to rejoin the Peetrees at once, and, although far from being his old self physically, began to make preparations for the return to Jim Crow.