“Time we wus off,” he remarked to Westerfelt.  “It takes peert drivin’ to catch the two-forty, south-bound.”

“That’s a fact,” said Washburn, coming from the stable, “but I’ll bet you’ll have to wait a few minutes, anyway.”  He was looking back in the direction from whence Westerfelt had come.  “I saw Miss Harriet come out o’ the hotel jest after you passed; it looks to me like she’s trying to overtake you.”

Westerfelt turned and saw Harriet about a hundred yards away.  “Maybe she is,” he said.  “I’ll go meet her.”

She paused when she saw him approaching, and he noticed that she looked greatly troubled and was quite pale.

“I must see you, Mr. Westerfelt,” she said, a catch in her voice.  “I came right at once so you wouldn’t get left.  Oh, Mr. Westerfelt, mother has just told me what she said to you last night.  I don’t know what she did it for—­I reckon she thought she was acting right—­but I cannot help her in deception of any kind.  I was not sick last night.”

“I knew you were not,” he said, and then he could think of nothing else to say.

“But mother said she told you I was, and that she left the impression on your mind that it was because you were going off.  That is not true, Mr. Westerfelt.  I cannot presume to dictate to you about what you ought to do.  Besides, it really seems a sensible thing for you to go.  She said you promised not to leave, but I can’t have it that way.”

Something in the very firmness of her renunciation of him added weights to his sinking spirits.

“You think it would be best for me to go?” he managed to articulate.  “Oh, do you, Harriet?”

“Yes, I do,” she said, emphatically, after a little pause in which she looked down at the ground.  “I am only a girl, a poor weak girl, and then—­” raising her fine eyes steadily to his face—­“I have my pride, too, you see, and it has never been so wounded before.  If—­if I had not loved you as I have this would have been over between us long ago.  And then I excused you because you were sick and unjustly persecuted, but you are well now, Mr. Westerfelt—­well enough to know what’s right and just to a defenceless girl.”

There was now not a trace of color in his face, and he felt as if he were turning to stone.  He found himself absolutely unable to meet her words with any of his own, but he had never been so completely her slave.

“You must answer me one question plainly,” she continued, “and I want the truth.  Will you, Mr. Westerfelt?”

“If I can I will, Harriet.”

“On your honor?”

“Yes, on my honor.”

“Were you not leaving simply to—­to get away from the—­(oh, I don’t know how to say it)—­the—­because you did not want to be near me?”

He shrank back; how was he to reply to such a pointed question?

“On your word of honor, Mr. Westerfelt!”

There was nothing for him to do but answer in the affirmative, but it fired him with a desire to justify himself.  “But it was not because I don’t love you, Harriet.  On the other hand, it was because I do—­so much that the whole thing is simply driving me crazy.  As God is my judge, I worship you—­I love you as no man ever loved a woman before.  But when I remember—­”