“I love you,” he muttered excusingly.

She shook her head.

“You know too little of me; you have too many doubt and fears,” she said.  “You do not love me, you do not even trust me.”

“I love you all the same,” he asserted positively and roughly.  “I loved you—­it was when I tied your hands to the chair that night and you looked at me with such contempt, and asked me if I felt proud.  That stung, that stung.  I loved you then.”

“You see,” she said sadly, “you do not even pretend to trust me.  I don’t know why you should.  Why are you here?  Why are you disguised with all that growth of hair?  There is something you are preparing, planning.  I know it.  I feel it.  What is it?”

“I told you once before,” he answered, “that the end of this will be Deede Dawson’s death or mine.  That’s what I’m preparing.”

“He is very cunning, very clever,” she said.  “Do you think he suspects you?”

“He suspects every one always,” answered Dunn.  “I’ve been trying to get proof to act on.  I haven’t succeeded.  Not yet.  Nothing definite.  If I can’t, I shall act without.  That’s all.”

“If I told him even half of what you just said,” she said, looking at him.  “What would happen?”

“You see, I trust you,” he answered bitterly.

She shook her head, but her eyes were soft and tender as she said: 

“It wasn’t trust in me made you say all that, it was because you didn’t care what happened after.”

“No,” he said.  “But when I see you, I forget everything.  Do you love me?”

“Why, I’ve never even seen you yet,” she exclaimed with something like a smile.  “I only know you as two eyes over a tangle of hair that I don’t believe you ever either brush or comb.  Do you know, sometimes I am curious.”

He took her hand and drew her to sit beside him on the bench under a tree near by.  All his doubts and fears and suspicions he set far from him, and remembered nothing save that she was the woman for whom yearned all the depths of his soul as by pre-ordained decree.  And she, too, forgot all else save that she had met her man—­her man, to her strange, aloof, mysterious, but dominating all her life as though by primal necessity.

When they parted, it was with an agreement to meet again that evening, and in the twilight they spent a halcyon hour together, saying little, feeling much.

It was only when at last she had left him that he remembered all that had passed, that had happened, that he knew, suspected, dreaded, all that he planned and intended and would be soon called upon to put into action.

“She’s made me mad,” he said to himself, and for a long time he sat there in the darkness, in the stillness of the evening, motionless as the tree in whose shade he sat, plunged in the most profound and strange reverie, from which presently his quick ear, alert and keen even when his mind was deep in thought, caught the light and careful sound of an approaching footstep.