She smiled in her turn.  “Did he regard you as a heretic?” she asked.

“Oh, sure! though he admitted that I might escape at the last by virtue of my ‘invincible ignorance.’  Then I would laugh at him, telling him he was a lot better than his bigotry.  But he got the best of me in other ways.  I owned the one buckboard in the northern half of Apache County, and my broncos were harness-broken and fast.  So, when there was a shoot-up at the Arroyo dance-hall, or any other job of swift brothering to be done, I had to drive Father Philip.”

She was musing again.  “You used to write me that you were on the edge of things out there:  it was a mistake, Tom; you were in the very heart of them.”

He shook his head.

“No; the heart of them was back yonder in the music-room.  There were chaos and thick darkness to go before that day of days; and it was your woman’s love that changed the world for me.”

“No,” she denied; “that was only an incident.  When chaos and darkness fled away, it was God who said, ‘Let there be light.’  The dawn had come for you before our day of days, Tom.”

He stretched himself luxuriously on the sward at her feet.

“You may put it that way if you please.  But I shall go on revering you as my torch-bearer,” he asserted.

“Tell me,” she said quickly; “was it for my sake that you spared Vincent Farley when all you had to do was to turn your back and go away?”

He took time to consider, and his answer put love under the foot of truth.

“No, it wasn’t.  If you make me confess the bald fact, I was not thinking of you at all, just at that one moment.”

“I know it,” she rejoined.  “And I am big enough to be glad.  Neither was it for my sake that you instructed your lawyers to return good for evil by redeeming the Farleys’ stock just before they left for Colorado, or that you made restitution to the families of the men at Gordonia for their losses during the strike.”

But again he was shaking his head dubiously.

“I’m not so sure about that.  It’s in any man to play high when the good opinion of the one woman is the stake.  I’m a poseur, like all the others.”

She smiled down on him and the slate-blue eyes were reading him to the latest-indited heart-line.

“You are posing now,” she asseverated.  “Don’t I know?—­don’t I always and always know?” And, after a reflective moment:  “It is a great comfort to be able to love the poses, and a still greater to be permitted to discern the true man under them.”

“I am glad to believe that you don’t see quite to the bottom of that well, Ardea, girl,” he said with sudden gravity.  “I get only occasional glimpses, myself, and they make me seasick.  I don’t believe any man alive could endure it to look long into the inner abysses of himself.”

“‘The heart knoweth his own bitterness,’” she quoted, speaking softly; and then—­O rarest of women!—­she did not enlarge on it.  Instead—­